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The Cambridge History of American Theatre
The Cambridge History of American Theatre is an authoritative and wideranging history of American theatre in all its dimensions, from theatre building to play writing, directors, performers, and designers. Engaging the theatre
as a performance art, a cultural institution, and a fact of American social and
political life, the History recognizes changing styles of presentation and performance and addresses the economic context that conditions the drama presented. The History approaches its subject with a full awareness of relevant
developments in literary criticism, cultural analysis, and performance theory.
At the same time, it is designed to be an accessible, challenging narrative. All
volumes include an extensive overview and timeline, followed by chapters on
specific aspects of theatre.
Volume Three examines the development of the theatre after World War II,
through the productions of Broadway and beyond and into regional theatre
across the country. Contributors also analyze new directions in theatre
design, directing, and acting, as well as key plays and playwrights through the
1990s.
The Cambridge History
of American Theatre
Volume Three
The Cambridge History
of American Theatre
Volume Three:
Post-World War II to the 1990s
Edited by
Don B. Wilmeth
Brown University
Christopher Bigsby
University of East Anglia
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011–4211, USA
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521669597
© Cambridge University Press 2000
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2000
First paperback edition 2005
Printed in the United States of America
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13 978-0-521-66959-7 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-66959-6 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-67985-5 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-67985-0 paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such
Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of illustrations
page ix
Contributors
xi
Preface and acknowledgments
xv
Introduction
1
CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY
Timeline: Post-World War II to 1998
COMPILED BY DON B. WILMETH WITH
21
J O N AT H A N C U R L E Y
1 American Theatre in Context: 1945–Present
87
ARNOLD ARONSON
2 A Changing Theatre: Broadway to the Regions
Broadway
163
163
LAURENCE MASLON
Off- and Off-Off Broadway
196
MEL GUSSOW
Regional/Resident Theatre
224
MARTHA LOMONACO
Alternative Theatre
249
MARVIN CARLSON
3 The Plays and Playwrights
294
Plays and Playwrights: 1945–1970
294
JUNE SCHLUETER
Plays and Playwrights Since 1970
M AT T H E W R O U D A N É
vii
331
viii
Contents
4 Musical Theatre Since World War II
419
JOHN DEGEN
5 Directors and Direction
466
SAMUEL L. LEITER
6 Actors and Acting
490
FOSTER HIRSCH
7 American Theatre Design Since 1945
514
RONN SMITH
Bibliography
534
Index
554
List of Illustrations
(credits appear with each photo)
Caricatures of Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Miller
page 165
Caricatures of Harold Prince, David Merrick, and Joseph Papp
170
Caricatures of the Shuberts, Lloyd Webber, and Cameron Mackintosh
187
Floor plan and sketch of Margo Jones’ Theatre ’50, Dallas, Texas
230
The Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, with 1963 production of The Three
Sisters in progress
238
Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver in Split Britches’ Lust and Comfort, 1995
264
Bread and Puppet’s What You Possess, 1990
266
The Living Theatre in Paradise Now, c. 1968
269
En Garde Arts’ production of Charles L. Mee, Jr.’s The Trojan Women a
Love Story, 1996
275
Act III (Spaceship) of Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, 1976
279
Richard Foreman’s Rhoda in Potatoland, 1974
281
The Wooster Group in The Road to Immortality: Part Two (. . . Just the
High Points. . . ), 1985
287
Mabou Mines in Epidog, 1996
289
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1949
297
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947
300
Magic Theatre’s production of Sam Shepard’s True West, 1981
351
Goodman Theatre’s production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross,
1984
370
August Wilson and Lloyd Richards, 1988
390
Trinity Rep’s production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, 1996
403
Finian’s Rainbow, 1947
423
Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady, 1956
428
ix
x
List of Illustrations
Gym scene, West Side Story, 1957
432
Gwen Verdon in Damn Yankees, 1955
434
Nude scene in Hair, 1968 (Broadway version)
444
Theoni Aldredge costume design for A Chorus Line, 1975
449
Sweeney Todd set under construction, 1979
453
New Rochelle scene in Ragtime, 1996 (premiere, Toronto)
462
Anne Bogart’s production of The Adding Machine, Actors Theatre of
Louisville, 1995
486
Lee Strasberg conducting a class at The Actors Studio
493
Eugene Lee’s model for the revival of Show Boat, New York, 1994
524
Scenic design by John Lee Beatty for Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, 1987
527
Tony Walton’s model for the revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum, 1996
527
Contributors
The Editors
is Professor of American Studies at the University of
East Anglia in Norwich, England, and has published more than twenty books
on British and American culture, including Confrontation and Commitment: A
Study of Contemporary American Drama 1959–1966 (1967); The Black American
Writer, two volumes (1969); The Second Black Renaissance (1980); Joe Orton
(1982); A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama, three
volumes (1982–85); David Mamet (1985); Modern American Drama 1940–1990
(1992); Contemporary American Playwrights (1999). He is the editor of
Contemporary English Drama (1991); Arthur Miller and Company (1990); The
Portable Arthur Miller (1995); and The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller
(1997). He is also the author of radio and television plays and of three novels:
Hester (1994), Pearl (1995), and Still Lives (1996).
CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY
DON B. WILMETH
is The Asa Messer Distinguished Professor and Professor of
Theatre and English at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. He is the
author, editor, or co-editor of more than a dozen books, including The
American Stage to World War I: A Guide to Information Sources (1978); the
award-winning George Frederick Cooke: Machiavel of the Stage (1980);
American and English Popular Entertainment (1980); The Language of American
Popular Entertainment (1981); Variety Entertainment and Outdoor Amusements
(1982); the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (co-editor 1993 edition with
Tice L. Miller; editor 1996 paperback edition); and Staging the Nation: Plays
from the American Theatre 1787–1909 (1998). With Rosemary Cullen he coedited plays by Augustin Daly and William Gillette, and currently he edits for
Cambridge University Press a series, Studies in American Theatre and Drama.
He is a frequent contributor to reference works and sits on editorial boards of
six journals. A past Guggenheim Fellow and President of the American Society
for Theatre Research, he was Dean of the College of Fellows of the American
xi
xii
Contributors
Theatre, 1996–98. In November 1998 he was presented a special achievement
award by the New England Theatre Conference for his contribution to the
theatrical profession with an impact on the national level.
The Contributors
teaches in the Theatre Division of the Columbia University
School of the Arts (where he served as Chair, 1991–98). Author of American
Set Design (1985) and The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography
(1981), he served as editor of Theatre Design & Technology from 1978 to 1988
and has contributed articles on theatre design and avant-garde theatre to a
wide range of publications. He is Chair of the History and Theory Commission
of the International Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Architects, and
Technicians, and he curated the American exhibit of scenic and costume
design and theatre architecture at the 1995 Prague Quadrennial. In addition
to Columbia he has chaired programs at Hunter College and the University of
Michigan and taught at Virginia, Cornell, and Delaware.
ARNOLD ARONSON
M A R V I N C A R L S O N is the Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre
and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York. He has received the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the George
Freedley Award for contribution to the literature of the theatre, the George
Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism, and is a Fellow of the American
Theatre. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and
the author of many books and essays on American and European theatre
history and theory. His most recent books are Performance: A Critical
Introduction (1996) and Voltaire and the Theatre of His Age (1998).
J O N AT H A N C U R L E Y ,
a graduate of Brown University, is a former Fulbright
recipient to Ireland and currently a doctoral student in English at New York
University.
J O H N D E G E N is a frequent director of musicals at Florida State University and
teaches in this area. He contributed numerous entries on musical theatre for
the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1993) and has published articles in
the Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre History Studies, Victorian Poetry,
and the Kurt Weill Newsletter.
MEL GUSSOW,
a critic and author, writes about theatre and other arts for the
New York Times. He is the author of Conversations with Pinter (1994) and
Conversations with Stoppard (1995), both published by Grove Press, and of
Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck (1971). He
is the author of profiles for The New Yorker and other magazines. Winner of
Contributors
xiii
the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, his reviews and essays
were collected in Theater on the Edge: New Visions, New Voices (1988). A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Gussow for three years served as President
of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. Prior to coming to the New York Times,
he was a critic and cultural writer on Newsweek magazine. He is a graduate of
Middlebury College (and recipient of its Alumni Achievement Award) and of
Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
is Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, City University of New
York, and the author of fifteen books on theatre and film. His most recent is
The Boys From Syracuse (1998), a study of the Shuberts’ theatrical empire. He
has written studies of The Actors Studio, Harold Prince, Hollywood acting,
film noir, and of the film work of Laurence Olivier, Joseph Losey, and Woody
Allen. Current projects include a book on Joseph Papp and the New York
Shakespeare Festival. Among publications that have featured his essays and
reviews are American Theatre, The Nation, The New York Times, Film Comment,
and Film Quarterly.
FOSTER HIRSCH
S A M U E L L . L E I T E R is Professor of Theatre at Brooklyn College, City University
of New York, and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He has been editor of Asian
Theatre Journal since 1992 and has published articles in such publications as
Literature East and West, Educational Theatre Journal, Drama Survey, Theatre
History Studies, Players, Theatre Crafts, and Asian Theatre Journal. His numerous books include the three-volume Encylopedia of the New York Stage,
1920–1930 (1985), 1930–1940 (1989), and 1940–1950 (1992); From Belasco to
Brook: Representative Directors of the English-Speaking Stage (1991); and From
Stanislavsky to Barrault: Representative Directors of the European Stage (1991).
He is also an actor and director.
L O M O N A C O is Associate Professor and Director of the Theatre
Program for the Department of Visual & Performing Arts at Fairfield University
in Connecticut. She is an active director, having premiered new works in New
York City, throughout New England, and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and
writer, who has published articles on American theatre and popular entertainments. She is author of Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment
Playhouse, 1921–1960 (1992) and is at work on a history of American summer
theatre.
MARTHA
is on the faculty of the Graduate Acting Program at New
York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he also teaches for the
Musical Theater Program. A graduate of Brown and Stanford, he worked for
seven years at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage, where he was the Associate
Artistic Director. At Arena he directed, wrote, or adapted many productions.
He has contributed to the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1993),
LAURENCE MASLON
xiv
Contributors
American National Biography (1999), and Dramaturgy in America (1996), and
has written articles and drawn caricatures in American Theatre magazine. He
wrote the “Mr. Gershwin Goes to Washington” concert for Carnegie Hall and
is currently working on a musical version of Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a
Lifetime.
is Professor of English at Georgia State University in
Atlanta, where he specializes in American drama. Among his publications are:
Understanding Edward Albee (1987); Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987);
American Dramatists (1989); “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”: Necessary
Fictions, Terrifying Realities (1990); Public Issues, Private Tensions:
Contemporary American Drama (1993); American Drama Since 1960: A Critical
History (1996). He is the editor of Approaches to Teaching Miller’s “Death of a
Salesman” (1995) and The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams
(1997). He is also editor of the South Atlantic Review.
M AT T H E W R O U D A N É
is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Lafayette
College. Her numerous publications include Metafictional Characters in
Modern Drama (1979); The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke (1981); Arthur
Miller (1987) with James K. Flanagan; Reading Shakespeare in Performance:
“King Lear” (1991) with James Lusardi; and Dramatic Closure: Reading the End
(1995). She has edited six books, including Feminist Rereadings of Modern
American Drama (1989) and Modern American Drama: The Female Canon
(1990). She has also published essays and reviews on modern drama and
Shakespeare and is co-editor of Shakespeare Bulletin.
JUNE SCHLUETER
R O N N S M I T H has written about theatre, film, and television design for a variety
of magazines, including American Theatre and Theatre Crafts. He is the author
of American Set Design 2 (1991) and Nothing But the Truth: A Play (1997). He is
also a frequent director.
Preface and Acknowledgments
As was demonstrated in Volume One of this study, the American theatre has
a history going back to the first encounter of Europeans with what, to them,
was a new continent and, in the form of Native American rituals and ceremonies, a prehistory. In Volume Two the contributors explained that the
theatre, the most public of the arts, has always been a sensitive gauge of social
pressures and public issues; the actor has been a central icon of a society
which, from its inception, has seen itself as performing, on a national stage, a
destiny of international significance. As articulated in the introduction to this
volume, the period since World War II has led to even greater variegated
theatre with worldwide influence.
For the purposes of this History we have chosen to use the word “theatre”
to include all aspects of the dramatic experience, including major popular and
paratheatrical forms. Contributors have been asked to address a particular
aspect of that experience – whether it be theatre architecture, stage design,
acting, playwriting, directing, and so forth – but they have also been invited
to stress the wider context of those subjects. Indeed, they have been encouraged to engage the context within which theatre itself operates. Hence, we
have set out to produce a history which will be authoritative and wideranging, which will offer a critical insight into plays and playwrights, but
which will also engage the theatre as a performance art, a cultural institution,
and a fact of American social and political life. We have sought to recognize
changing styles of presentation and performance and to address the economic context which conditions the drama presented. This may lead, on occasion, to a certain recrossing of tracks as, for example, in the case of a chapter
on playwrights which invokes the career of particular actors and a chapter on
actors which describes the plays in which they appeared, but this is both
inevitable and desirable, stressing, as it does, the interdependence of all
aspects of this craft.
The theatre has reflected the diversity of America and the special circumstances in which it has operated in an expanding country moving toward a
xv
xvi
Preface and Acknowledgments
sense of national identity. The history of the American stage and the making
of America have been coterminous, often self-consciously so, and to that end
each volume begins with a timeline followed by a wide-ranging essay which
attempts to locate the theatre in the context of a developing society. Both
timeline and overview also allow individual authors to avoid any urge to offer
inclusiveness and to provide, when appropriate, more detailed coverage of
important individuals or events, so that, for example, Arnold Aronson offers
a unique perspective in his introductory overview chapter, while other
authors, such as Marvin Carlson in chapter 2, focus attention on one particular aspect of this history, such as alternative theatre.
The History could have run to many more volumes but the economics of
publication finally determined its length, together with the number of illustrations that were possible. In the case of this present volume, this has meant
both that certain choices of emphasis have been necessary, with the result
that more attention has been paid to some topics rather than others, and that
we have not been able to include as many illustrations as we would have liked.
The precise division between the three volumes and the strategies involved
in structuring this History, however (especially since from the outset it was
agreed that this would be a collective history), was a matter of serious debate,
a debate in which the editors were assisted by others in meetings which took
place in 1994 at Brown University, in the United States, and the following year
at York University, in Canada. It is proper, in fact, to pause here and, as we did
in Volumes One and Two, to gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance
for the Brown meeting given by Brown University, the curators of its special
collections, and Cambridge University Press. For the York meeting we are
indebted to Christopher Innes, who served as an advisor to the editors, and
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, who helped
fund the expenses. In Providence we were able to gather a notable group of
experts: Arnold Aronson, the late Frances Bzowski, T. Susan Chang, Rosemary
Cullen, Spencer Golub, James V. Hatch, Warren Kliewer, Brooks McNamara,
Brenda Murphy, Tom Postlewait, Vera Mowry Roberts, Matthew Roudané,
David Savran, Ronn Smith, Susan Harris Smith, and Sarah Stanton. In Canada
the editors were joined by Christopher Innes and the authors of overview
essays for each volume (Arnold Aronson, Tom Postlewait, and Bruce
McConachie). We are indebted to these experts for their thoughtful and challenging ideas and recommendations.
Ultimately, of course, the editors accept responsibility for the present
format, but without the preliminary discussions we would have doubtlessly
floundered. In the final analysis, the fact that we have chosen roughly 1870
and 1945 as defining chronological parameters is, in part, an expression of our
desire to relate the theatre to a wider public history but in part also a recognition of certain developments internal to theatre itself. Any such divisions
Preface and Acknowledgments
xvii
have an element of the arbitrary, however, chronological periods doing
damage to the continuity of individual careers and stylistic modes. But, division there must be and those we have chosen seem more cogent than any of
the others we considered, despite our strong suspicion that any periodization
can be misleading. In truth, Volume One extends to the post-Civil War period,
and Volume Two, in order to establish some sense of continuity, dovetails the
time frame of that volume, as this volume overlaps World War II, though its
major emphasis is post-World War II.
The organization of the three volumes does, however, reveal a bias in favor
of the modern, which previous prefaces in this series of volumes deplored. Yet
it does not presume that theatrical history began with Eugene O’Neill, as often
implied, but simply recognizes that the story of the American theatre is one
of a momentum which gathers pace with time, while acknowledging the rich
heritage and accomplishments of American theatre during its earlier periods.
As suggested above, the History does not offer itself as encyclopedic. Given
restrictions of space this could never have been an objective, nor was such a
strategy deemed appropriate. Those wishing to research details not found in
these pages should consult the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1993,
1996), edited by Don B. Wilmeth and Tice L. Miller, and Theatre in the United
States: A Documentary History (vol. I, 1750–1915), edited by Barry Witham (vol.
II is well underway). Both works were published by Cambridge University
Press, and this History was planned with those volumes in mind, as a complementary effort. The Guide is an especially important supplement to this
volume. Rather than offer comprehensive detail, what this History does aim
to do is to demonstrate that this nation is constructed of more than a set of
principles enforced by a common will. It builds itself out of more than contradictions denied by rhetoric or shared experience. The theatre first played
its part in shaping the society it served; later it reflected the diversity which
was always at odds with a supposed homogeneity. Inevitably derivative, in
time it accommodated itself to the new world, and, in creating new forms, in
identifying and staging new concerns, was itself a part of the process which it
observed and dramatized.
Theatre is international. Today, an American play or prominent production
is as likely to open in London as in New York and to find its primary audience
outside the country of its birth. The 1997–98 Broadway season was a good
example of this, with a revival of Cabaret that began its life in England, a blockbuster hit musical Ragtime that developed in Canada, and major prizes going
to a play which originated in France (Art by Yasmina Reza) and one that was
Anglo-Irish in origin (The Beauty Queen of Leenane). Despite the restrictions
imposed by Actors’ Equity, actors move between countries, as do directors
and designers. Film and television carry drama across national frontiers. Yet,
the American playwright still addresses realities, myths, concerns born out of
xviii
Preface and Acknowledgments
national experiences; the American theatre still stages the private and public
anxieties of a people who are what they are because of history. The accomplishments of the American theatre are clear. This is an account of those
accomplishments as it is, in part, of that history.
We are extremely grateful for financial support from our institutions –
Brown University and the University of East Anglia – and we are pleased to
acknowledge the editorial assistance of Diana Beck, funded by the Brown
Graduate School, who made many chores less arduous in the early preparation of this volume. The initial idea for this History came from Cambridge
editors Sarah Stanton and Victoria Cooper, who not only brought the editors
together but have also been a constant source of support and encouragement; Anne Sanow, formerly with Cambridge University Press, and Victoria
Cooper, in the British Office of the Press, have helped to shepherd this volume
through its various stages, and Audrey Cotterell has served us well in the
copy-editing process. The thirteen authors of chapters in this volume are
clearly indebted to the scholarship of those who have gone before, as well as
to colleagues still active in the field. The specific debts of each author are suggested in notes and, most significantly, in the bibliographical essays that conclude each chapter. Credits for illustrations are indicated with each
photograph. Though not successful in every instance, every possible effort
has been made to obtain photographic permission. We have nonetheless
given credit to all photographers when known and would be delighted to seek
formal permission for subsequent editions should contact finally be made. We
are grateful to individual authors who furnished or suggested illustrations
and the staffs of the collections identified who helped to locate or provide
illustrations. In particular, we are pleased to single out the assistance of
Melissa Miller of the Humanities Research Center’s Theatre Collection at the
University of Texas; Ian Rand of the Publicity Department of Livent, Inc.;
Christine Nicholson of Davis, California; Oskar Eustis of the Trinity Repertory
Theatre; designers Eugene Lee, Harry Matheu, Tony Walton, and John Lee
Beatty; Levi D. Phillips of Special Collections, University of California–Davis;
John Degen, Martha LoMonaco, and Marvin Carlson; photographer Bill Rice;
Peggy Shaw of Split Britches; Carol Bixler of En Garde Arts; Michael B. Dixon
and Jennifer McMaster of Actors Theatre of Louisville; Ruth Maleczech of
Mabou Mines; Richard Foreman of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre
Company; Anne Reiss of The Wooster Group; Jennifer Garza of the Alley
Theatre; and Anna Strasberg and Ivana Ruzak of the Lee Strasberg Theatre
Institute. We are especially grateful to Laurence Maslon for the three wonderful caricature composites that he drew expressly for this History and
which grace his section on Broadway.
Introduction
Christopher Bigsby
The previous volume of this History told the story of the growth of Broadway
theatre, the emergence of major playwrights, the shift from melodrama to a
new realism and from that realism to a self-conscious experimentalism. It
identified the extent to which the theatre reflected social change, as America
moved from a rural to an urban economy, engaged a modernity which both
delighted and appalled, and found in social inequity the source of dramatic
energy. It charted the continuing influence, on actor training and design no
less than dramaturgy, of the European theatre but also identified the extent to
which America now exercised a powerful role. Through boom and
Depression, the theatre in all its guises – from the Little Theatre movement,
to the Federal Theatre, Broadway comedies and musicals, to powerful dramas
of social and psychological experience – proved a public art with public
appeal.
Yet already that role was threatened by the emergence of Hollywood.
Ahead lay television. By the turn of the twenty-first century hundreds of channels would be available while cyberspace would exert its own seductive
allure. Meanwhile, the economics of an art which required the collaborative
efforts of a large number of people, used its plant inefficiently, and was often
inconveniently situated, made it potentially less attractive than other arts or
forms of entertainment.
This volume, though, is not an account of decline. Indeed, in some respects
it covers a period in which the achievements of the American theatre were
acknowledged worldwide as never before. For much of the second half of the
century its playwrights were dominant, its musicals defined the genre, its
actors, directors, and designers proved uniquely talented and internationally
influential. But it did change in radical ways, which, unsurprisingly, mirrored
transformations in society.
After a decade or so Broadway declined, a decline balanced by the emergence, in New York, of Off- and Off-Off Broadway. A similar development was
to occur in Chicago and elsewhere. Indeed, the dominance of New York itself
1
2
Introduction
came to an end as regional theatres spread throughout the country, generating plays that then fed back to Broadway, reversing the flow of the prewar
world. And if audiences diversified on a regional basis, so they did on that of
race, gender, national origin, and sexual preference. In other words, as the
ruling metaphor of American society changed, from melting pot to rainbow,
the theatre acknowledged this. The presumed homogeneity of the audience
no longer prevailed. Just as television and publishing began to adopt a strategy of niche marketing, the theatre sought out a variety of different audiences,
though often the concerns of such groups proved paradigmatic.
There were parallels with previous periods. The annual accounts of New
York theatre offered by Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. itemized the continuing impact of
British theatre, a thread which runs through all three of these volumes. It was
responsible for just under half the Tony Awards for Best Play between 1964
and 1989 and rather more than half of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best
Play awards for the same period. By the 1970s, indeed, the British, previously
believed to be genetically incapable of writing musicals, began to displace the
homegrown product, until that time rightly regarded as one of the major
accomplishments of the American theatre. Indeed in June 1997, Cats, by the
ubiquitous Andrew Lloyd Webber, became the longest running musical in
American theatrical history, displacing A Chorus Line (1975). Meanwhile, the
experimental theatre of the teens and twenties had its corollary in the fifties
and sixties, modernism was revisited, and where the Depression had radicalized the theatre in the thirties, the war in Vietnam did the same in the sixties
and early seventies.
For the first time, though, the Federal Theatre aside, public subsidy was
granted and though it was modest – occasionally to the point of near invisibility (in the 1970–71 season the American government’s support for the arts
amounted to seven and a half cents per head; the figure for West Germany was
two dollars and forty-two cents; that for England, one dollar and twenty-three
cents) – it was a sign that theatre was at last acknowledged as an art which
made legitimate demands on the public purse as well as on public attention.
Nonetheless it was an embattled art, constantly struggling to survive. But it
was an art which accurately registered the shifting mood and concerns of a
nation which stepped from Depression into war and from war into the uncertainties of a post-nuclear age. And as such it told the story, in the words of
Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, of the “disruption of the anticipated
American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American
past, out of each generation’s getting smarter . . . out of each generation’s
breaking away from the parochialism a little further” (American Pastoral, 85).
In part, as the decades passed, that involved acknowledging what Roth calls
“the indigenous American beserk,” and in part recognizing that the centripetal project implied in the motto E Pluribus Unum could be seen as a false rather
Christopher Bigsby
3
than simply a utopian model, as radically divergent experiences were presented on America’s stages.
The war marked another kind of divide. Some of those who had helped
define the 1920s and 1930s did not survive to do the same for the postwar
world. In the novel, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Nathanael West, and Gertrude Stein died between 1940 and 1946, while Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck no longer seemed to have
a purchase on their society, despite their international recognition in the form
of the Nobel Prize. In the theatre, likewise, Susan Glaspell, Sidney Howard,
Jerome Kern, Lorenz Hart, and, within a few years, Philip Barry and Robert
Sherwood were dead, while Maxwell Anderson and Lillian Hellman produced
little to rival their earlier work.
Eugene O’Neill, meanwhile, had succumbed to a Parkinson-like disease
which frustrated his efforts to write. He had, however, stored up works of
great accomplishment, which, for over a decade after the war, would light up
a Broadway season, works which plundered his life for the raw materials of
plays that confronted his characters with their failure to realize the hopes that
had once energized and now ironized them, plays whose very bleakness he
had judged too great for wartime audiences.
A further irony awaited, however, in that the two not so very young men
who appeared on the scene in the mid-1940s – Tennessee Williams and Arthur
Miller, both in their thirties at the time of their first Broadway successes –
were in fact shaped by the previous decade in which they had written, and
indeed staged, radical dramas. They certainly reflected the mood of their own
time – Miller, in particular, taking pride in his sensitivity to the contemporary
– but both were marked by a decade in which the solitary individual was
obliged to acknowledge a social obligation or be excluded alike from history
and the moral world. Miller, as was signaled by the title of his first success, All
My Sons, opted for a drama which staged the individual’s struggle to negotiate
personal meaning in a social context. Williams, as is indicated by the title of
one of his plays, Fugitive Kind, explored the plight of the self in recoil from the
public world.
Stylistically, O’Neill moved from a lyric celebration of the outsider, to an
exuberant expressionism, to a strained realism, a naturalism which mocked
its own assumptions. Williams and Miller both sought a more fluid, or, to use
Williams’s own word, plastic staging in which dramatic metaphor found a correlative in visual symbol. O’Neill’s appeal lay in a relentless quality, as characters were driven beyond the point at which they could negotiate the terms of
their existence. Miller’s lay in the strenuous demands made of those required
suddenly to confront the nature and extent of their own moral failings.
Williams took his audience in a wholly different direction. His plays often
threatened and, indeed, delivered, violence or displayed sexual need. Their
4
Introduction
southern settings and lyrically expressive language offered a seductive exoticism not wholly unrelated to that being explored by Jack Kerouac, for whom
the improvisatory free spirit lay, if not at the heart of meaning, then at the
heart of the search for such.
Writing of the 1950s, Daniel Bell observed that: “America in mid-century is in
many respects a turbulent country. Oddly enough, it is a turbulence born, not
of depression, but of prosperity. Contrary to the somewhat simple notion that
prosperity dissolves all social problems, the American experience demonstrates that prosperity brings in its wake new anxieties, new strains, new
urgencies” (The End of Ideology, 103). Prosperity, indeed, was in part the
problem. As Kenneth Keniston and Paul Goodman, psychologist and philosopher respectively, were to observe, materialism was not an ideal in itself; on
the contrary, it provoked a desire for transcendence, for a personal economy
independent of that generated by a mechanistic civilization. The very
success of America gave economic power to a generation that in time found
the ritual of earning and spending inadequate to their needs. They, or at least
a number of them, became rebels without knowing the faith in whose name
they rebelled. America, immediately after the war, may have celebrated its
renewed status as a city on the hill and many of its citizens begun to dream
a familiar dream, but there were others, and many writers among them, for
whom the logic of history had other lessons to teach than America’s steady
rise toward the empyrean.
Looking back from the distance of the mid-seventies, Bell, or, rather, the
writers whose views he summarized, and who had themselves emerged as
commentators and primary movers (Norman O. Brown, Michel Foucault, R. D.
Laing, and, in another sense, Charles Reich and Theodore Roszak), saw a generation which, in the late fifties and through the sixties, had chosen as their
field of revolt “consciousness: a new polymorphous sensuality, the lifting of
repression, the permeability of madness and normality, a new psychedelic
awareness, the exploration of pleasure” (Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society, 476). But this is not how the world seemed in 1945 when the war
ended and Americans celebrated the return of what they took to be normalcy.
As ever, wars both mark a social and psychological divide and provoke a
desire for continuities. Philip Roth, or his fictional alter ego Nathan
Zuckerman, in American Pastoral, speaks of “the clock of history” being
“reset” as Americans celebrated the end of the Second World War. “Everything
was in motion,” he insists. Men were back from Europe and Japan. America
was the sole possessor of the Bomb. What could resist the newly unleashed
energy of a nation politically secure and economically booming? Admittedly,
the Depression was only a few years in the past and a tremor of anxiety could
still pass through those who had lived through that time, but the rallying cry,
Christopher Bigsby
5
as he recalls it, was “Make something of yourselves.” His generation, he insists,
“were steered relentlessly in the direction of success” (41).
But Roth’s novel is a story not just of paradise remembered (the title of its
first section) but of paradise lost. For if ahead lay a materialism to be celebrated and deplored, ahead also lay assassinations, racial conflict, riots, corruptions, and another war which scarred a generation, and his novel is an
account of the loss of innocence, the crumbling of assurance, a deepening
anxiety about personal and public meaning, the “disruption of the anticipated
American future. . . the ritual postimmigrant struggle for success turning pathological” (85–86).
But that lay far ahead. For the moment, the response was euphoria, followed by a desire to reach back not to Depression but the world which that
disruption of the dream had seemed to invalidate, a world of material wellbeing and a confident faith in American principles. Consumerism was the new
god while Manifest Destiny seemed reinstalled and legitimated. People picked
up their lives and elected first a haberdasher from Missouri and then a general
from Denison, Texas (who described his policy as one of “dynamic conservatism”) as President, content to view the past only as processed through the
calculated nostalgia of Saturday Evening Post covers. Meanwhile, a pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, was on hand to tell mothers that a new day had
dawned, that they should trust themselves. He reassured them that the rigors
of discipline need no longer prevail; desires could be satisfied without guilt.
The one-car family became the two-car family. Television plugged
Americans into a common cerebral cortex. The consumer society consumed.
As John Updike’s narrator observed, in a short story called “When Everyone
Was Pregnant,” “Guiltlessness. Our fat Fifties cars, how we loved them, revved
them: no thought of pollution. . . Romance of consumption at its height.
Shopping for baby food in the gaudy trash of the supermarkets. Purchasing
power: young, newly powerful, born to consume.” And yet, as he pointed out,
this coexisted with a “smug conviction that the world was doomed. Beyond
the sparkling horizon, an absolute enemy. Above us, bombs whose flash would
fill the scene like a cup to overflowing” (in Museums and Women, 92–93). And,
indeed, the world had changed profoundly. The sky had been lit up by the twin
suns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when the Soviet Union broke the
American monopoly on nuclear destruction and China was “lost,” for the first
time a country previously invulnerable to attack felt deeply vulnerable. And
since its military and scientific preeminence had been an article of faith, such
catastrophes could only be a result of treachery and subversion. When had
that subversion begun? Was it, perhaps, in the days of the New Deal or the
brief period of U.S.–Soviet cooperation? If so, then it was necessary to rewrite
history in such a way as to show that the thirties had been an aberration.
But the war itself had already sent a shock wave through those who could
6
Introduction
not regard the allied victory as a vindication of the human spirit, and that
tremor, as ever, was registered by the writer. Thus, in Europe, the bleakly
comic ironies of the absurd had their roots in a very precisely definable political and social reality, while the nouveau roman, which marginalized the
human figure, was, Alain Robbe-Grillet explained, no more than an expression
of what he had observed in a war which relegated the individual human being
quite literally to the ash heap. The Jewish writer in particular was unlikely to
regard the Holocaust as no more than a brief interruption in the ascent of man.
The Jewish American writer, indeed, took from the war either a sense that
the individual was a victim, trying to understand the ironies in which he was
apparently trapped, or a desperate desire to reconstitute values apparently
so profoundly denied as to negate the very idea of social or metaphysical
purpose. Either way there was a sense of deep dismay, often rendered comically. The irony, however, was that by degrees such writers found themselves
speaking for those for whom an old world – essentially rural, untroubled – no
longer seemed accessible. Nor were Jewish writers the only ones to flirt with
black humor (James Purdy, John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller), or
the deracinated or alienated individual (J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers,
Truman Capote). The new world was urban or, at best, suburban and, beyond
the glitter of consumer products, was increasingly perceived as charged with
tensions, infected with deep insecurities – sexual, financial, racial. What was
at stake was a sense of identity and purpose, and unsurprisingly this was felt
most acutely by those whose grip on national myths and realities was most
tenuous: the Jewish and African American writer. No wonder Sartrean
Existentialism hovered in the wings. They might acknowledge their victim
status but they also resisted it in the name of an existential drive which was
sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not. The irony is that the protagonists of such books as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), Saul
Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), Bernard Malamud’s The
Assistant (1957), Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (1959), Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man (1952), and James Baldwin’s essays Nobody Knows My Name
(1957) came to seem expressions of a more general sense of alienation and
anxiety. They might be marginalized by WASP society but such marginalization came increasingly to seem a common, and even celebrated, experience
(see Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso). In the words of the protagonist of Invisible Man, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak
for you?”
For Professor of Psychology Kenneth Keniston at Yale University, drawing
on his own work and that of others in the fifties and sixties,
The prevailing images of our culture are images of disintegration, decay, and
despair; our highest art involves the fragmentation and distortion of traditional realities; our best drama depicts suffering, misunderstanding, and
Christopher Bigsby
7
breakdown; our worthiest novels are narratives of loneliness, searching, and
unfulfillment . . . Judged by the values of past generations, our culture seems
obsessed with breakdown, splintering, disintegration, and destruction. Ours
is not an age of synthesis but of analysis, not of constructive hopes but of
awful destructive potentials, not of commitment but alienation. (The
Uncommitted, 2)
The argument may have been overstated and the comparison with the past
suspect, but this language did, indeed, have currency, not least in literature.
And what was true in the novel and poetry was true also in drama. Neil
Simon presented comically what Arthur Miller presented tragically, namely
the dilemma of the individual who no longer feels he has a connection with
his own life or with the community in which he finds himself. Miller in particular set himself very consciously to reconstitute the moral world denied
equally by the Holocaust, which made its way into more than one of his plays,
and by a particularly American penchant for denying the past. Those
Americans who wanted to believe in business as usual, selling America back
to itself as the best product on the market, were, in his plays, made to face the
fact of their own fallibility as well as the falseness of the promises which elevated the future over the present and which denied the moral logic which
linked that present to the past. He wrote plays which were as centrally concerned with moral identity as the novels of Bellow and Ellison. Indeed, in 1945
he himself wrote a very successful novel, Focus, which explored both the
nature of American anti-Semitism and the existential dilemma of a man who
struggles toward a sense of his own identity and of his responsibility toward
others. In his plays his characters cry out their names precisely because identity has been placed under such pressure. The American dream, meanwhile,
becomes an evasion, merely the expression of a need for coherence and
meaning, a project whose indefinite deferral is a judgment equally of the individual and his society. When Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman, tries to offer
his false dreams as an inheritance to his sons he acknowledges a failure which
touches very directly on his sense of himself. As Erich Fromm observed:
When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life,
he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is
bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former because the
problem of existence can only be solved by each one only for himself, and
not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one
needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer. (The Art of
Loving, 86)
By the same token Tennessee Williams’s characters spoke of their sense of
paranoia as power and money assumed an implacable authority, and the
natural processes of mortality denied the very promises that life seemed to
offer. His fragile characters, menaced in their sexuality and their social roles,
8
Introduction
desperate for a love which simultaneously terrified them, registered something more than his intensely personal sense of oppression as homosexual
and artist. Throughout his life he insisted on his radicalism, a radicalism
literal enough in the works which he wrote in the thirties, but evident, too, in
the subversive drive of plays which constantly celebrated the marginal, the
dispossessed, the disregarded. In interviews and public statements he
denounced a society which literally and legally proscribed his sexuality but
that also, from time to time, menaced the freedom which his plays celebrated
even in the moment that that freedom was being withdrawn. What some took
for his southern gothicism, his melodramatic imagination, he regarded as a
staging of the conflict between an implacable materialism and a redeeming,
though ultimately defeated, human spirit.
Despite the fact that decades are little more than convenient means of organizing experience, rarely beginning and ending with any precision, they do, on
occasion, have a persuasive shape. It was true of the twenties, heralded by
Prohibition, as it was of the thirties, bracketed by the Crash and World War II.
The sixties, likewise, obligingly began with what seemed like a clear shift in
values, style, and priorities, though the election of John F. Kennedy was
perhaps of greater symbolic than actual significance, not least because the
drama of his assassination brought an abrupt end to his administration (and
it is hard not to think of the events of those days, played out as they were on
television, as a kind of theatre). Certainly little was accomplished in his brief
presidency either domestically or in terms of foreign policy, beyond a somewhat grudging moral commitment to racial justice at home and a near lethal
engagement with the Soviet Union over Cuba and a growing involvement in
Vietnam. But everything about him signaled change. He was young, Catholic,
sexually active (just how much so only becoming apparent later). He valued
the arts, invited writers to the White House, and went to the theatre. His successor, too, invited writers to the White House. The difference was that some
of them refused to go because by then, and despite his genuine commitment
to social justice, Lyndon Johnson had committed America more completely
to the war in Vietnam and this had distorted national politics and radicalized
a generation. Robert Lowell and Arthur Miller both declined invitations,
Miller, ironically, to Johnson’s signing of a bill setting up the National
Endowment for the Arts, itself a significant change in attitudes toward
support for the arts in America. The impact both of social change and of that
war was clear on all aspects of American life.
Not the least important aspect of that change was the emergence, essentially from the mid-fifties onward, of teenagers. With money in their pockets
they provoked and responded to a new market in popular music, while finding
images of their youthful disaffection in the movies – James Dean’s drive to
Christopher Bigsby
9
oblivion merely reinforcing his role as social rebel. A decade later they were
tuning in, turning on, and dropping out at the behest of Timothy Leary or
marching against the war. The contraceptive pill had released them from biological discipline and hence, to a large degree, from moral constraint. Dr.
Spock, who had been responsible for their nurturing, now found himself
attacked for creating a permissive generation and himself followed what
seemed to him to be the logic of his profession, as pediatrician, by protesting
the war and even running for the presidency as a way of protecting future generations of babies. In short, within the course of a decade old authorities had
lost their power: economic, social, moral.
Kenneth Keniston spoke of an “unprogrammatic alienation,” a “rebellion
without a cause” (The Uncommitted, 67). In his book on alienated youth in
America he observed the degree to which the vocabulary of social commentary increasingly stressed the distance between people and between people
and the objects of their concern.
Alienation, estrangement, disaffection, anomie, withdrawal, disengagement,
separation, non-involvement, apathy, indifference, and neutralism – all of
these terms point to a sense of loss, a growing gap between men and their
social world. The drift of our time is away from connection, relation, communion and dialogue, and our intellectual concerns reflect this conviction.
Alienation, once seen as imposed on men by an unjust economic system, is
increasingly chosen by men as their basic stance toward society. (The
Uncommitted, 1)
It is hard not to see this as a description of the mood of Edward Albee’s first
success, The Zoo Story (1959), produced on the cusp of the sixties, in which
the protagonist, withdrawn, disaffected, acutely aware of the gap between
himself and others, has, indeed, chosen alienation; nor hard either to see in it
a reflection of those concerns voiced by another psychologist, Erich Fromm,
who, in his fifties book The Art of Loving, reflected both Keniston’s views and
those to be found in Albee’s The American Dream when he oberved that:
“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity. . . He is alienated
from himself, from his fellow men and from nature” (88), consoled by the
“strict routine of bureaucratised, mechanical work” (74). The paramount
need, Fromm insisted, was “to leave the prison of his aloneness.” The mechanism whereby this was to be attained was love: “a power which breaks
through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him
with others” (24). The imagery was specifically that taken up by Albee, the
potentially religious overtones being preserved in the symbolism of his early
plays, as it was by Tennessee Williams, for whom love was indeed an active
principle capable of neutralizing the alienation felt by so many of his characters. As the fifties slid into the sixties, love, counterpoised to the mechanistic
drive of materialism or, more specifically, of the military, was celebrated as a
10
Introduction
secular virtue or a spiritual principle, by a counterculture celebrating the
body and frequently exhibiting a fascination with Zen Buddhism, a direction
taken by Paul Goodman (an admirer, more accurately, of Taoism), whose interests spanned those of academic analysis and theatre.
By the sixties the novel seemed to be flying in all directions. Gore Vidal wrote
a patrician version of history, John Updike and John Cheever a middle-class
and suburban one respectively. John Barth, meanwhile, blended history with
fiction, as E. L. Doctorow, William Styron, and Robert Coover were to do. There
were parallels in the theatre as Miller revisited the Holocaust in After the Fall
and Incident at Vichy, O’Neill plunged further back in the posthumous More
Stately Mansions (1962), and Howard Sackler explored a version of the African
American past in The Great White Hope (1968).
There were parallels, too, to the non-fiction novel of Truman Capote, the
new journalism of Tom Wolfe, and the explorations of contemporary reality
by Norman Mailer, though several of these came from abroad, most notably
Rolf Hochuth’s The Investigation (1965) and Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter
of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1964). Martin Duberman’s In White America (1963)
deployed documentary material, as did Daniel Berrigan’s and Saul Levitt’s The
Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1969), which began Off-Off Broadway and transferred to Broadway, but the documentary play proved of limited appeal.
Perhaps a closer parallel is that between a new spirit of experimentalism in
the novel, which included such diverse talents as William Burroughs, Ken
Kesey, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme,
and Kurt Vonnegut, and the neo-Surrealist and Dadaist concerns of the creators of Happenings, the Artaud-influenced performances of the Living
Theatre, the Grotowski-inspired work of the Performance Group, the early
plays of Sam Shepard, and the work of Jean-Claude Van Itallie, Rochelle
Owens, Megan Terry, and Ronald Tavel. The fact is that increasingly there
seemed to be no orthodoxy either to enforce or rebel against. Certainly, in
1961 Philip Roth spoke of the difficulty for the writer of making American
reality credible. However, what seemed difficult in 1961 must have appeared
all but impossible as assassination piled on assassination, Americans were
invited to join the drug culture, cities burned, and young men were returned
from a foreign war in body bags. Revolt, pressing toward revolution, spread
around the globe. Authority was challenged, no less in the arts than in any
other area of life.
The counterculture gave primacy to the Pleasure Principle over the Reality
Principle; resisted the idea of distinctions, divisions, categories, hierarchies.
It distrusted rationality as self-limiting and located an essentially Romantic
exploration of the self in the context of a new communalism. Much the same
had been true of the early decades of the century when Modernism was born
Christopher Bigsby
11
out of a loss of confidence in old forms and structures, political and social no
less than aesthetic. The bohemian elite, then as now, extended experimental
life styles in the direction of art, the Provincetown Players, for example, being
the product of those equally committed to anarchism, free love, communitarian politics, anything, in short, which marked them out as different from those
who preceded them. They established their New York center in Greenwich
Village. So, too, did many of those who in the fifties and sixties reacted against
normative values and conventional theatre. Off-Broadway and Off-Off
Broadway were born.
This move from the large scale to the small, from the presumed homogeneity of the audience to self-selecting coteries, from spaces which separated performers from observers to those which brought them into immediate
proximity, itself reflected changing values. If Off- and Off-Off Broadway were
not physical locations they did imply a shift in priorities. Money was not a
primary determinant, at least not at first (though Off-Broadway saw a rapid
increase in costs and therefore ticket prices). Experiment became possible. In
one direction the theatre theorized itself, self-consciously exploring its component elements, opening itself to European and other influences. In another,
it examined the politics of its own existence. After all, this was a theatre which
appealed not to the expense-account executive or those bussing in from New
Jersey, but to a largely student audience whose own growing radicalism – aesthetic and political – it partly reflected, as later it appealed to those who for
the first time saw their own lives dramatized on a stage.
The immediate precursor to sixties experimentation in the theatre was the
Living Theatre, established in the fifties, whose directors, Julian Beck and
Judith Malina, saw themselves as anarchists, whose company lived as well as
performed together, and whose productions were, more often than not, explorations of the equivocal nature of art and reality – which is to say they were a
late flowering of Modernism; and the theatre, and other arts, did show a
renewed interest in Dada and Surrealism, for example. One of the Living
Theatre’s productions was of a play by Paul Goodman, a psychiatrist, who, in
Growing Up Absurd, argued that the individual was now cut off from the natural
world by a machine culture. And another aspect of sixties counterculture was,
indeed, a renewed interest in the physical being, a desire to reinstate the body
– both as sensual and political fact. Thus the overt sexuality, the nudity, the
stress on physical movement to be found both in the counterculture at large
and the theatre in particular, was matched by a conviction that physical presence – at demonstrations, marches, rock concerts – was itself crucial. Being
there was what counted. There was a ritualized, a ceremonial and symbolic
content to experience, and to the theatre, which required participation. And
if that was evidenced by love-ins, teach-ins, Woodstock and the March on
Washington, it was also evident in that erosion of the distinction between
12
Introduction
actor and audience which became a central tenet of belief, if also frequently
a naive objective, for certain theatre groups. The Living Theatre and the
Performance Group, in particular, appeared to revel in and indeed demand
audience participation, though a certain totalitarianism revealed itself from
time to time. Attending the theatre itself was now seen as an event sometimes
with almost quasi-religious overtones.
The removal of clothing was in part designed to épater le bourgeois, though
many of those participating were card-carrying members of the bourgeoisie
themselves. Beyond that, it was offered as a sign of authenticity as if, like King
Lear, they were getting down to the simple, unaccommodated man and
woman. At such events the drama critic found himself (and more than 90
percent of critics were male) awkwardly placed, such authenticity being
ambiguously related to theatrical truth. Thus the Living Theatre’s Julian Beck
attacked Walter Kerr, the New York Times Sunday critic, for his failure to
accept the invitation to audience members, in Paradise Now, to join the cast
on the stage and remove his clothes. He was, Beck asserted, obviously a
lonely man in a decade in which solitariness was, if not a crime, then at least
tangential to a celebratory and politically confident communalism.
Unsurprisingly, an ever vigilant capitalist Broadway (and Hollywood)
quickly moved to transform the pursuit of truth into the pursuit of titillation.
When the Off-Broadway Hair, in which the drafting of a young man for the
Vietnam War provided part of the plot, was moved to Broadway, nudity was
added. There were, however, limits to which the authorities were not prepared to go, the police arresting cast and producers of the Off-Off Broadway
Che! on charges of obscenity and consensual sodomy, thereby inadvertently
raising the issue at the heart of Diderot’s paradox, which debated the question of whether the best actor is one who simulates or feels the emotions portrayed, though in ways that Diderot is unlikely to have imagined. It was not,
however, a tactic which could redeem the unredeemable. Despite the success
of Oh! Calcutta!, Grin and Bare It! (the exclamation point being, it seems, a
required and highly charged signifier) folded after twelve performances on
Broadway in the 1969–70 season while The Way It Is, despite an admirable
number of previews, never actually succeeded in opening.
If the sixties were characterized by the experiments and exuberance of the
counterculture, they were also marked by a growing politicization that contrasted sharply with the largely unfocused discontents of the previous
decade. As Daniel Bell had pointed out, in the fifties the disenchanted were
not the workers, who were more than happy to lay claim to the new materialism, but the intellectuals whose disaffection had lost its ideological basis.
Not the least of the ironies of the McCarthy period, indeed, was that those
summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (a wonderfully Orwellian newspeak title) had long since been disenchanted with the
Christopher Bigsby
13
doctrines of Marx. The disaffection of intellectuals now was less rooted, more
diffuse. It had elements of nostalgia, as mass society and mass culture began
to erode those qualities which they presumed to have distinguished cultural
life hitherto. It also related to their own lack of a role. In the thirties the artist
was a standard bearer for revolution. At a time of crisis the intellectual,
vaguely in concert with an even more vaguely perceived working class, had
a seemingly central function, if not in fact then at least in rhetorical and symbolic terms. In the fifties he was not only marginal but a subject of suspicion,
whether as teacher, artist, or writer. The intellectual had not only lost status
but a place to stand. America was working again. In the thirties left-leaning
writers (and, from their own point of view, what other kind were there?) had
seemingly been driven by passion. Even Ernest Hemingway had abandoned
the mannered ironies of A Farewell to Arms to write To Have and Have Not,
with its insistence that “a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance”
(though the penultimate word was rendered by an asterisk, being seen as
more subversive than the thought itself). The whimsies of early Steinbeck
were transformed into a blend of Karl Marx and Ralph Waldo Emerson in In
Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath. In the fifties, by contrast, the energy
came from guilt, self-doubt, liberal angst, alienation. Marx had been displaced
by Freud. But the sixties were to offer the intellectual a role once again. An
essayist, James Baldwin, mediated with government; a poet, Robert Lowell,
challenged attempts to coopt culture to the side of authority; a novelist,
Norman Mailer, turned into the biographer and autobiographer of revolt; academics, such as Herbert Marcuse and Noam Chomsky, challenged national
priorities and values. And the theatre found itself, briefly, at the center,
though the center proved remarkably unstable.
The revolt was an international one, as powerful in Europe as in America.
In France, where a government was nearly toppled from power, Jean-Louis
Barrault’s theatre, the Odéon, became for a while a focal point for student
revolt and, by chance, members of the Living Theatre were present for the
debates that were conducted there (Barrault was subsequently sacked by
France’s Minister of Culture, André Malraux). They returned to America fired
with enthusiasm, believing that theatre had a key role to play and, indeed,
theatre, if not their own somewhat gnomic and romantically self-regarding
version of it, did prove part of that complex of cultural and political forces
which together formed the political, spiritual, and social rebellion of that
overheated decade. They took their theatre onto the street, seeking confrontation with authority, an action which proved paradigmatic. On the West
Coast, the San Francisco Mime Troupe performed in a park and fought municipal authorities for the right to do so, becoming quickly radicalized, as did the
Bread and Puppet Theatre (participants in many anti-Vietnam marches).
California’s El Teatro Campesino was radical from the start, performing for
14
Introduction
striking grape pickers. Universities from Berkeley to Princeton, University of
California–Davis to Buffalo, staged events, sketches, agit prop dramas. Still
other theatrical rebels interrupted performances in Broadway theatres,
becoming, in their own minds, theatrical guerillas, infiltrating the bland products of an art which had settled for mere entertainment, thereby becoming
complicit with those who would distract the citizenry from the crimes of the
state. In Harlem, LeRoi Jones turned his back on a promising dramatic career,
staged his plays on the street, thereby losing a federal grant, and changed his
name to Amiri Baraka prior to lending his talents to the black cause by writing
agit prop plays designed for all-black audiences.
Collective work, reflecting the communitarian politics of its creators,
tended to replace plays which were the product of an individual sensibility.
Indeed, the writer was frequently marginalized as the source of a suspect
authority or embraced as merely part of a collective whose collectivity was
itself a statement of priorities and values. Few of these groups were, at least
initially, as concerned with craft as with ideological convictions, or they
adapted their craft to the necessities of communicating in public spaces
beyond the confines of a purpose-built building. Theatre was a means, its
transformations a key to those other transformations – social, economic,
political – that it was designed to provoke.
There were other groups, however, for whom craft was central, and though
these, too, were radicalized by Vietnam, the Open Theatre and the
Performance Group, in particular, were governed, at least initially, by a
concern for intellectual and artistic rigor.
All of these experiments, concerned with the erosion of the supposedly
clear distinction between audience and performer, served as a reminder, on
the one hand, of the performative content of social behavior and, on the other,
of the communal nature of experience and the power generated by a shared
perception of reality – social and political no less than artistic. In other words,
the theatre offered itself as paradigmatic and, indeed, was seen as such by
sociologists (Erving Goffman), literary critics (Richard Poirier), and psychotherapists, no less than by those who in staging their public rites sought to
exorcise what they saw as the rationalist, positivist, racist, imperialist, and
capitalist thrust of their society. And that reaction against authority was, to
some degree, evident within the theatre as the playwright was invited to
become no more than a participant in the creation of a text and even the
authority of the director was disputed or willingly surrendered. As Jerzy
Grotowski insisted, “In our productions next to nothing is dictated by the
director” (quoted in Guernsey, Curtain Times, 171). The productions were
designed to express the communal conditions of their construction and
hence to offer a corrective to the abuse of power and authority in society.
But this fact alone should signal a warning, for though American policy did
Christopher Bigsby
15
change, and the pressure of public opinion (shaped in part by those who
staged the great demonstrations, marches, and paratheatrical events of the
decade) played its part in this, theatre no more wholly gave itself over to such
activities than were the public motivated by the communitarian ideals,
radical politics, and vague romanticism of the counterculture. The riots of
1965, 1967, and 1968 left many Americans bemused after what they had taken
to be a settling of accounts with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voter
Registration Act of 1965. With casualties rapidly growing toward what would
eventually become 55,000 young Americans dead, America simply ceased to
believe what its leaders said. In 1968 the Tet Offensive convinced many that
the war was lost and that American lives were being sacrificed for no purpose.
The white middle class itself became increasingly alarmed at the thought that
their own children might be required to sacrifice themselves to a cause they
found increasingly difficult to understand in a country remote from their own,
where it was hard to believe that national security was genuinely at risk. The
President resigned and America elected Richard Nixon, who promised to end
the war, though for some time his promises proved no more reliable in this
area than in others.
The theatre, meanwhile, had not given itself over wholly to politicized
groups or even radical experimentation, though the theories of Antonin
Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski proved deeply influential on the avant-garde, the
one stressing the multiple resources of theatre – its power to create images
not necessarily dependent on language – the other focusing on the actor and
his or her relationship with an audience inducted into theatre as they might
be into a religion. The fact is that some of the most powerful and successful
plays of the 1960s were products of Broadway, if not typical Broadway fare.
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), brilliantly funny and
articulate, like his earlier one-act play The Zoo Story, expressed a sense of the
collapse of relationships, itself a key to a failure of nerve and commitment
which had social and even political dimensions. It expressed an optimism
which quickly disappeared from his later work, a closing down of possibilities
already apparent in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, A Delicate Balance (1968).
By the end of the decade the apocalyptic tone of his plays was undeniable,
Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968) offering a lament for
a world in which communication had proved impossible and annihilation
something more than a present possibility.
Another powerful and successful play, Arthur Miller’s The Price, was staged
in that annus mirabilis, 1968. A play which looked back toward the thirties, and
whose set was that of a realist drama, it nonetheless managed to engage a
question which in some ways was antecedent to that raised or implied by the
self-consciously public art of the decade: what is one’s responsibility for one’s
own life and therefore for the lives of others? His earlier sixties plays, After the
16
Introduction
Fall (1964) and Incident at Vichy (1964) had also engaged history but in such
a way as to raise questions about a contemporary world in which racism was
a dominant fact and personal commitment a necessity.
The decade ended with Arthur Kopit’s Indians (1969), which, like Miller’s
plays, used the past as a means of commenting on the present. It was,
however, a product of Arena Stage in Washington and as such anticipated a
process that became a commonplace thereafter, as plays reached Broadway
either from regional theatre, which expanded rapidly in the seventies, or from
Europe. Costs, union intransigency, a deteriorating Broadway environment,
the loss of informed reviewers (New York lost most of the newspapers which
had guaranteed a wide spread of opinion: the World, Telegram, Sun, Journal,
American, Herald, and Tribune had gone, effectively leaving one voice to
decide on the future of a production and, through occasional forays across
the Atlantic, even to decide which British shows would transfer), the star
system, all contributed to a theatre unwilling to take the initiative in terms of
productions or to stage work which could not be guaranteed a sufficiently
long run to recoup investment.
New plays did continue to be produced on Broadway but often they made
their way from Britain, from Off-Broadway, and from the regional theatres. It
remained true, however, that Broadway was still seen as an ultimate destination, no matter how perilous and costly productions there might be, no matter
that its audience was increasingly defined by price and not always receptive
to work which challenged their assumptions.
By the mid-seventies Vietnam was finally over, though the plays which registered its effects continued. Students, intellectuals, and radical artists could
no longer convince themselves that they spoke for or to an America attracted
by the slogans of revolt. The barricades came down and America ceased to
live its politics on the street, except in so far as the appearance of the homeless spoke of another kind of politics. A decade of rebellion gave way to what
was dubbed the “me” generation, which in turn led to a decade in which the
denial of social responsibility became an article of faith for government.
Watergate seemed to slam the door on the notion that government might be
the source of renewal, while the later election of Ronald Reagan was an
explicit assertion that government should have little role in the lives of citizens who were seen as being effectively in competition with one another for
resources and success, coming together only to celebrate national myths of
unity and national superiority. Nor did having an actor in the White House
imply that the arts had a friend at court. On the contrary, he was no believer
in funding organizations that might be seen as supporting unexamined
national values.
It is tempting to see this turn from a public to a private world as symbol-
Christopher Bigsby
17
ized in the theatre by a series of plays which explored illness, from cancer and
deafness to stroke. Robert Wilson’s work with an autistic boy, and the emphasis on aphasia and brain damage in several of Sam Shepard’s plays, seemed to
imply a similar withdrawal from the public world and from social engagement.
The experimental theatre, meanwhile, which in the sixties had concerned
itself with the interplay between the private and public self, an exploration of
the social no less than the aesthetic implications of the verb to act, became
primarily concerned with the nature of consciousness, with the manner in
which the real is constituted, involving the audience, not, like the Living
Theatre, as fellow actors, but as fellow playwrights, creating the world to
which they then responded. This was a theatre which resisted the literary
(unless it be the Modernism of Gertrude Stein), its aesthetic being derived in
part from art (and, indeed, there were lines which connected what became
known as the Theatre of Images with the late fifties neo-Surrealist experiments, Happenings, and events). There were also those – Richard Foreman
and Ping Chong – who were fascinated by the uses of video in the context of
their performances.
In the eighties and nineties a group of performance artists began to generate work out of their own autobiographies, work which reinstated language as
they told stories, elaborated accounts of personal events, and presented oneperson shows that made the self the subject and object of concern. Such
events, of course, served to raise questions about the nature of that self, how
it is composed and presented, whether it be Spalding Gray in Swimming to
Cambodia, or Linda Montano in The Story of My Life. In other words, like the
Theatre of Images, this work theorized the nature of dramatic presentation,
not only raising questions about the constructed self (questions that for some
performers had political implications, since that self had been appropriated
by others) but also challenging presumptions about the communal nature of
theatrical performance, though Laurie Anderson has insisted that what interests her is less the uniqueness of her experiences than the similarity which
audiences detect between their own privacies and the performer’s. Thus,
though Spalding Gray, who began working with the Wooster Group in the
seventies, has spoken of the narrative of his stories being shaped by events
in his own life, and being, at the same time, “the next chapter of my life” and
a “public confessional,” he does not see this as narcissism, because, as he
insisted in 1997, “a narcissist is not conscious of their narcissism.” His work,
therefore, he regards as “already reflexive.” But, like Anderson, he also asserts
that “I try to go through myself out to all other selves because, if I’m talking
about neurotic behavior, I think we all share that in common . . . all I can do is
look in – in order to look out.”1 And that line out of privacy was important to
some performance artists for whom a motivating force in such a focused selfexpression lies in the freedom it offers to express gender, race, nationality,
18
Introduction
and sexual preference, unmediated by playwright or the conventions of
actorly presentation.
There was something equally ambivalent on this score about the concerns
of those women playwrights who emerged in the seventies and eighties,
winning three Pulitzer Prizes in the latter decade. Long marginalized or,
indeed, excluded, such dramatists tended to focus on interpersonal relationships, the psychological fall-out of inhabiting a society which saw men as
primary actors in the social drama. For a number of them, too, illness – mental
and physical – became a principal subject, as it did of gay playwrights who
had barely made their presence felt before AIDS gave them a subject which
was all but unavoidable. And this is where assumptions about a turn from
public to private prove difficult to sustain, for the fact is that public and
private are intimately connected, a truth felt equally by Hispanic, Asian,
Chicano, and, indeed, African American playwrights. August Wilson’s plays
may quite consciously have concerned themselves with the private lives of
his characters but his plays were also a deliberate attempt to construct an
alternative history of America as seen through the eyes of those presumed to
be no more than the victims of that history. And what was true of his work was
true, too, of that produced by others for whom the theatre became an agency
of cultural reinforcement, a mechanism for dramatizing the tensions which
defined an American experience that could no longer be plausibly presented
as homogeneous.
However, in so far as there was a tendency toward the single performer
(and, under the pressure of economics, the single-set, small-cast play), at the
other extreme was the musical, which by century’s end often required the
kind of budget more usually associated with film (with, sometimes, returns to
match), though in the late nineties the British composer of hit musicals,
Andrew Lloyd Webber, predicted the end of the large-scale musical. But the
fact remained that in order to compete with the cinema’s computer-generated
special effects, its power to overwhelm the sensibility of audiences not as
Artaud had wished, but with digitalized images and enhanced sound systems,
the musical had turned either to pastiche and nostalgia, presenting revivals,
musical compilations from past successes, or movie musicals transposed to
the stage, or to what in the nineteenth century might have been called extravaganzas, in which the mechanics of stage construction vied with the
actor/singers, and sound was under the control of engineers (the miking of
shows, incidentally, even spreading from musicals to straight plays). Thus,
audiences responded to an onstage train in On the Twentieth Century (1978)
as they did to the helicopter in Miss Saigon (1991) or the sinking ship in Titanic
(1998), just as they had a century and more before to similar gestures of technical accomplishment. It is not, however, necessarily a good sign when audiences applaud the scenery. But by this time theatre competed not only with
Christopher Bigsby
19
movies but also with rock shows that were very consciously staged as theatrical events, deploying the full resources of technology and with the musicians often presenting themselves as a series of characters, as a blend of self
and role in which the distinction was not always easy to make (Alice Cooper,
Madonna, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, and so on).
As the turn of the century and millennium arrived, no single style, no dominant ideology, no ruling orthodoxy, no theatrical center predominated. Just
as the desperate desire to pull together a heterogeneous society deferred to
a different model of society, so theatre reflected this. In the late nineties a
fierce dispute broke out over the legitimacy of what was coyly called non-traditional casting, the casting of parts with no particular attention to race and
even gender. In 1986 the Non-Traditional Casting Project established a
database of minority actors available for work in theatre, film, and television.
Tony Kushner called for cross-gender casting in Angels in America (1993). But
in 1997 a debate was staged between two significant figures in contemporary
American theatre. By what seemed something of an irony to some, the
Professor of Drama at Harvard University (and artistic director of the
American Repertory Theatre), Robert Brustein, argued in favor of such a practice, and the multiple Pulitzer Prize-winner, August Wilson, against, on the
grounds that, since theatre remained institutionally white, special funding,
and the task of developing black talent, should go to the relatively few African
American theatres.
Beyond what might seem a parochial cultural debate lay a continuing disagreement as to the definition of America and the function of theatre. America
was, after all, abandoning affirmative action programs and, in the process,
according to President Clinton, of reinventing segregation, with whites closing
doors previously left ajar and African Americans withdrawing into their own
communities, even segregating themselves in college dorms and cafeterias. A
mid-nineties march on Washington, in stark contrast to Martin Luther King’s
in the sixties, was all-black and all-male. In 1991 America may have seen its
first African American drama critic on a mainstream newspaper (the Denver
Post), but it was still a noteworthy event, as was the first major play, also in
Denver, to employ a cast consisting entirely of Native Americans and
Hispanics. Robert Brustein spoke out of a liberal conviction that the United
States would only fulfill its promise when its inhabitants realized that “we are
citizens first, Americans second, and tribalists third.” For Wilson, this was to
deny the reality of the America he saw, an America in which racism flourished,
as it was to deny the legitimacy of a cultural identity which lay outside equally
of liberal individualism and a supposed national identity: “inside all blacks,”
he insisted, “is at least one heartbeat that is fueled by Africa.”
For Brustein, “art does not change consciousness,” while for Wilson,
“Art changes individuals, and individuals change society.”2 If he thereby
20
Introduction
reinvented the individualism whose substance he doubted, he also reaffirmed
his belief in the power of theatre to propose its transformations as paradigmatic. It was not that he wrote avowedly political plays – in a simple form
these had all but disappeared from the American theatre – but that he saw in
the theatre a form with the power both to reflect society and, in the process,
to change our sense of it and thus, incrementally, to change the thing itself.
Those who turned to the theatre in the early days of the new republic did
so because they wished to capture a world which was changing before their
eyes. Beyond that, they wanted to be part of those changes, staging the real
but also what might become the real, in terms of an emerging national identity. At the turn of the twenty-first century those drawn to the creation of
theatre in America have, as ever, mixed motives. But among their objectives
is to offer their own interpretation of the American experience in the knowledge that to do so is to contribute to a definition that can only ever be provisional, for this is a society dedicated to the proposition that all men can be
other than they are created.
Theatre remains what it ever was: entertainment, distraction, amusement,
polemic, private confession, public assertion, communal rite, a shared apprehension of the nature of experience, and a challenge to our notions of what
might constitute that experience. It is deeply implicated in the economics and
politics of its day, as it is in the shifting aesthetic values of its own culture and
the wider international culture of which it is a part.
American drama continues to invent, to speak, to imagine America. It is as
various as the society which generates it. Design flaws in software may have
sent many computers spinning back to the turn of the last century with the
arrival of the new millennium, but the theatre, whose condition of being and
whose primary justification depends upon the cooperative endeavors of
artists – writers, actors, directors, designers – and the coming together of
artists and public in a living art, continues to assert a gravitational pull for
those who will never be entirely satisfied with the privacies of some other arts
or the ironic community of those who meet only as glowing pixels on a screen
lit by nothing but electricity and their own desire to connect.
Notes
1 Gray quoted in Tom Dewe Matthews, “Gray Area,” The Independent (26 June 1997):
6–7.
2 See Stephen Nunns’s analysis of the Brustein–Wilson debate in “Wilson, Brustein
and the Press,” American Theatre 14 (March 1997): 17–19.
Timeline: Post-World War II to 1998
Compiled by Don B. Wilmeth with Jonathan Curley
This chronological chart by years (only major events are ordered
chronologically within each year) provides a quick overview of
major events during the time period covered by this volume
(through June 1998). Briefly noted in the timeline are the following:
in column one, major theatrical events in the history of the theatre
in the United States; in column two, other U.S. cultural and his-
DATES
1946
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
torical events of significance, or representative data; and in column
three, key historical and cultural events from other parts of
the world, included in order to provide points of reference in a
wider context. Unless otherwise indicated specific theatrical
events in column one occurred in New York City and dates refer to
production.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
U.S. birthrate soars to 3,411,000 births,
up from 2,858,000 the previous year.
Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun
is directed by Joshua Logan and stars
Ethel Merman.
State of the Union by Howard Lindsay
and Russel Crouse.
Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine.
Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the
Forest.
Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday opens
with Judy Holliday, who takes over at
last minute and achieves stardom.
Call Me Mister, with sketches by Arnold
Aurebach and Arnold B. Hewitt,
premieres, showing the difficult
transition of World War II veterans from
war to the labor force.
U.S. GI Bill passed.
21
Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh
premieres.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Fulbright scholarships established for
U.S. teachers, researchers, and students
to encourage exchange programs with
other nations.
J.-P. Sartre publishes Existentialism and
Humanism.
U.S. military branches united under
Department of Defense.
Atomic Energy Commission founded.
U.S. scientist creates first artificial
snowstorm by seeding cloud with dry ice.
U.S. scholars complete “Revised
Standard Version” of the Bible.
Violent protests against British rule in
several Indian cities (21–22 Feb.).
Verdicts reached in Nuremberg war trials.
Riots over bread shortages in Paris and
Rouen (4 Jan.).
German novelist Herman Hesse awarded
Nobel Prize for Literature.
Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
Juan Perón elected President of
Argentina.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Anita Loos’s Happy Birthday.
Hans Morgenthau’s Scientific Man vs.
Power Politics.
Eva Le Gallienne’s American Repertory
Theatre founded; defunct by 1948.
John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
22
1947
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Actors Studio opens.
Poet Robinson Jeffers adapts Medea for
the stage.
Bertolt Brecht summoned to testify
before House Un-American Activities
Committee.
James B. Conant’s Understanding Science.
Willem De Kooning begins series of black
and white paintings which establish him
as a leading Abstract Expressionist.
Mark Rothko’s painting Prehistoric
Memories.
William Wyler’s film The Best Years of
Our Life released.
Bikini swimsuits introduced.
President Truman establishes Committee
on Civil Rights.
22nd Amendment proposed by Congress
to limit presidential services to two
terms in office (21 March). It is ratified 26
February 1951.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Soviet government withdraws artistic
subsidies and imposes strict theatrical
censorship.
United Nations holds first session.
Italy becomes a republic.
French playwright Jean Anouilh’s Medea.
Christopher Fry’s play A Phoenix Too
Frequent.
Terence Rattigan’s play The Winslow
Boy.
Truman warns USSR that U.S. “would
support free peoples who are resisting
subjugation by armed minorities or by
outside pressure.” The policy is known
as the Truman Doctrine.
Jackie Robinson becomes first black man Marshall Plan implemented as
to sign on to a professional ball club, the coordinated program to help European
Brooklyn Dodgers (11 April).
nations recover from World War II.
Christian Dior introduces the “New Look” Pandit Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah,
into women’s fashion clothes; ultraleaders of two major Indian political
feminine and full-skirted, it differs greatly parties, Congress and Muslim League,
from wartime wear and fashion (3 June). endorse Britain’s plan for partition of
India (June).
Margo Jones founds theatre (as Theater
’47) in Dallas; Alley Theatre opens in
Houston.
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named
Desire opens on Broadway with Marlon
Brando (4 Dec.).
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.
Brigadoon, a Jay Lerner and Frederick
Loewe production, hits the stage.
23
Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg’s Finian’s
Rainbow introduces choreographer
Michael Kidd.
First Tony Awards dinner held at Waldorf
Astoria.
The Heiress by Ruth and Augustus Goetz.
William Haines’s Command Decision.
First production of O’Neill’s A Moon for
the Misbegotten (written 1943) in Ohio;
did not play New York.
Congress passes antilabor-union TaftThe “Dead Sea Scrolls” discovered in
Hartley Act over Truman’s veto (23 June). cave in Jordan.
Rocket-powered research plane flown by
Charles Yeager breaks the sound barrier
at 650 m.p.h. (14 Oct.).
Polaroid camera developed.
U.S. congressional committee claims
there are Communists in movie industry,
leading to blacklisting of suspect writers
and actors.
Lionel Trilling’s Middle of the Journey.
Marc Chagall’s painting Madonna of the
Sleigh.
Albert Camus’s novel The Plague.
India gains independence.
Anne Frank’s diary published.
Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of
Jean Genet’s play The Maids.
Economic Analysis.
Willem De Kooning’s painting Pink Angels.
Goodyear introduces tubeless tire.
First microwave cooker sold in United
States.
Henry Ford dies.
Great Books Program started.
Sculptures by Albert Giacometti and
Henry Moore exhibited.
American physicist William Shockley
invents the transistor.
CORE stages “Journey of Reconciliation,”
first freedom ride to challenge
segregation on interstate transit.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Living Theater founded by Judith Malina
and Julian Beck.
Organization of American States Charter
provides for regional security and
economic development.
A Universal Declaration of Human Rights
approved by UN General Assembly. It
declares essential human rights for all
people.
Thomas Heggen’s and Joshua Logan’s
World War II comedy Mr. Roberts,
starring Henry Fonda, opens in February.
World premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s The
Caucasian Chalk Circle at Carlton College.
Harry S. Truman elected thirty-third
President.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
1948
A Streetcar Named Desire wins Pulitzer
and Drama Critics’ Award (film, 1951).
24
Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate premieres,
with Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison.
Controversial, pseudo-scientific Kinsey
report on male sexual behavior
published.
First self-service McDonald’s hamburgers
restaurants open in California. The
franchise will spread across the nation
and around the world by end of
twentieth century.
Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.
Moss Hart’s Light Up the Sky.
B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two.
Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the
Thousand Days.
Lindsay and Crouse’s Life With Mother.
First New York production of Williams’s
Summer and Smoke (premiered in Dallas
preceding year; film 1961).
Alger Hiss accused of spying.
James Gould Cozzen’s Guard of Honor.
Jackson Pollock exhibits controversial
“action painting” in New York for first
time.
Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes,
Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko found
school of art to encourage Abstract
Expressionism.
George Orwell’s novel Nineteen EightyFour.
Gandhi assassinated (30 Jan.).
State of Israel proclaimed, with David
Ben-Gurion as head of provisional
government (14–15 May).
Somali people appeal to UN for united
Somalia after Ethiopia takes control of
Somalia’s Reserved Areas (23 Sept.).
First Arab–Israeli War.
T.S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize for Literature.
Laurence Olivier’s film Hamlet opens.
Giorgio de Chirico’s painting Antique
Era.
1949
Clifford Odets writes The Big Knife.
25
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman,
directed by Elia Kazan, is brought to
stage and wins Pulitzer.
The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
South Pacific, with Mary Martin and Ezio
Pinza, wins Pulitzer in 1950 (second
musical to do so).
The Falmouth Playhouse, a summer
stock repertory theatre, is founded by
Richard Aldrich.
Maxwell Anderson’s musical
dramatization of Alan Paton’s novel Cry,
the Beloved Country, called Lost in the
Stars, produced.
Andrew Wyeth paints Christina’s World in
American Realist style.
James Michener’s Tales of the South
Pacific.
Baseball slugger Babe Ruth dies.
LP (long-playing record) introduced.
Armed forces desegregated per order of
the President.
Robert Motherwell’s painting At Five in
the Afternoon.
Jackson Pollock’s painting Number 10.
Term “Cold War” coined by Bernard
Baruch.
Mary McLeod Bethune founds National
Council of Negro Women, which opposes
poll tax and racial discrimination, and
promotes teaching of black history in
public schools.
William Faulkner wins Nobel Prize for
Literature.
Pandit Nehru becomes Prime Minister of
India.
The North Atlantic Treaty is signed in
Washington, DC by Britain, Belgium,
Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark,
Luxembourg, Portugal, Iceland, Norway,
Canada, and the United States. It
promises mutual assistance against the
Soviet Union in a defensive pact under
the guidance of the North Atlantic
Council (4 April).
Robert Merton’s Social Theory and Social Revolution in China under Mao TseJustice.
Tung. Beijing falls to Communists; the
Morton White’s Social Thought in
Siege of Peking a crucial military success
America.
as well (22 Jan.).
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a
French Existentialist Simone de
Thousand Faces.
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
Eire leaves Commonwealth and becomes
Republic of Ireland (18 April).
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
T.S. Eliot’s drama The Cocktail Party.
Anita Loos’s book Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes is adapted for the stage as a
musical by Jule Styne; makes Carol
Channing a Broadway star.
Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story.
1950
During 1949–50 season, only fifty-nine
new plays debut on Broadway.
26
The New York Commissioner of Licenses
requires Michael Todd’s Peep Show, a
burlesque revue, to tone down its strip
tease routine and make costumes less
revealing.
The Arena Stage is founded by a group
associated with George Washington
University, in Washington, D.C.
Shirley Booth opens in William Inge’s
Come Back, Little Sheba.
Frank Loesser’s and Abe Burrows’s Guys
and Dolls opens 24 November at The
46th Street Theatre in New York and
runs for 1,200 performances.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Apartheid established in South Africa.
Bertolt Brecht founds The Berliner
Ensemble.
The Brink’s Bank Robbery breaks all
previous records for losses to armed
robbers: $1,218,211 in cash and
$1,557,000 in money orders is taken
(17 Jan.).
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission is ordered
by President Truman to construct a
hydrogen bomb.
Minimum wage of $.75 goes into effect
UN Security Council establishes unified
under amendment to the Fair Labor and command under the United States to
Standards Act.
send aid to South Korea (7 July).
Color television broadcasts begin.
George Bernard Shaw dies (b. 1852).
Diners’ Club introduces the charge card,
the first example of a credit card.
Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination.
Henry Steele Commager’s The American
Mind.
T.W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian
Personality.
Ezra Pound’s Cantos published.
Korean War begins.
Clifford Odets’s The Country Girl,
directed by the author.
Novelist Carson McCullers adapts her
book The Member of the Wedding to the
stage.
Broadway theatre begins tradition of the
Gypsy Robe when a dancer presents a
dressing robe adorned with momentos
to a friend in the cast of the next show to
open.
Arthur Miller’s version of Ibsen’s An
Enemy of the People.
1951
27
The American Shakespeare Theatre is
founded in Stratford, Connecticut, by
Lawrence Langner.
Actors’ Equity appoints Frederick
O’Neal to head committee to investigate
declining employment of black actors on
Broadway. O’Neal finds that only thirteen
blacks had parts in Broadway plays
between 1 September 1951 and 15 March
1952.
John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera.
Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo
(film 1955).
Maxwell Anderson’s Barefoot in Athens.
Rodgers–Hammerstein production of
The King and I, with Yul Brynner and
Gertrude Lawrence (in her final stage
role), opens 29 March.
David Riseman et al., The Lonely Crowd.
Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society.
Ralph Bunche wins Nobel Peace Prize for
negotiating armistice between Israelis
and Arabs.
Jackson Pollock’s painting Lavender Mist.
Chiang Kai-Shek resumes presidency of
Nationalist China.
So-called “Theatre of the Absurd”
appears in France (e.g., Eugène Ionesco’s
The Bald Soprano).
Christopher Fry’s play Venus Observed.
National Council of Churches is
established.
Over 100 million tons of steel
manufactured annually by this year.
Direct long-distance dialing service
begins.
Winston Churchill becomes Prime
Minister of Britain.
Scandal erupts in college basketball
when revelations of game-fixing for
gambling emerge.
Eugene Ionesco’s play The Lesson.
Christopher Fry’s play A Sleep of
Prisoners.
Jean Anouilh’s play Colombe.
William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness.
Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us.
Robert Frost’s Complete Poems.
James Jones’s From Here to Eternity.
J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
C. Wright Mills’s White Collar.
Talcott Parsons’s The Social System.
Hannah Arendt’s Origins of
Totalitarianism.
W.V.O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of
Empiricism.”
Salvador Dali’s painting Christ of St. John
on the Cross.
Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd and
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s opera The
Pilgrim’s Progress premiere in London.
DATES
28
1952
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
George Kennan’s American Diplomacy,
1900–1950.
Hans Reichenbach’s The Rise of Scientific
Philosophy.
Kenneth Arrow’s Rational Choice and
Individual Value.
Donald Bevan’s and Edmund Trzcinski’s Release of Huston’s film The African
Stalag 17.
Queen and Minelli’s An American in Paris.
Lillian Hellman’s The Autumn Garden.
Gian Carlo Menotti composes Amahl and
the Night Visitors for NBC Television.
Sidney Kingsley’s stage version of Arthur C.Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New
Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon
South.
produced.
Jan de Hartog’s The Fourposter.
I Love Lucy begins its long television run.
Off-Broadway records first major success Dwight D. Eisenhower elected President. U.S. explodes first hydrogen bomb at
with José Quintero’s revival of Tennessee
Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific.
Williams’s Summer and Smoke at the
Circle in the Square.
The American Mime Theatre founded in Rocky Marcianio wins heavyweight
Batista seizes power in Cuba (10 March).
New York by Paul Curtis.
boxing championship from “Jersey” Joe
Walcott in Philadelphia, knocking him
out in the thirteenth round.
Joseph Kramm’s The Shrike wins Pulitzer. Some 17 million U.S. homes have TV sets Dr. Kwame Nkrumah becomes first
at year’s end, up from 5 to 8 million in
African prime minister south of the
1950.
Sahara (21 March).
The Climate of Eden by Moss Hart opens. In Dennis et al. v. U.S., Supreme Court
U.S. occupation of Japan ends (28 April).
rules in favor of 1946 Smith Act, a law
against the advocacy of overthrow of
government by force.
George Axelford’s The Seven Year Itch
begins a 1,141-show run on Broadway.
Arthur Laurents’s The Time of the
Cuckoo.
29
1953
Phoenix Theater founded by T. Edward
Hambleton and Norris Houghton.
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible uses Salem
witch hunts as parable for McCarthyism.
Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real.
Irish expatriate Samuel Beckett’s play
Waiting for Godot.
Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap
opens at London’s Ambassador Theatre
(still running in 1999).
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison published. Dr. Albert Schweitzer wins Nobel Peace
Whitaker Chambers’s Witness.
Prize.
Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be.
Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light.
Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny.
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and
the Sea.
Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of
Contraceptive pill introduced.
American History.
Humphrey Bogart wins Best Actor Oscar Jean Anouilh’s play Waltz of the
for The African Queen.
Toreadors.
John Cage’s notorious musical
Ionesco’s play The Chairs.
composition “4’ 33”,” in which no sound
is recorded.
Willem De Kooning’s Woman I painting.
George VI dies; Elizabeth II becomes
Film High Noon released.
Queen of England.
The Rosenbergs, first sentenced as
U.S. biologist James Watson and British
atomic spies in 1951, are executed.
physicist Francis Crick describe their
famous model of the DNA molecule,
showing its structure to be a double
helix.
Playboy magazine, the first largePolish emigré C. Milosz’s The Captive
Mind.
circulation magazine in America
featuring photos of scantily clad and
Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths.
nude women, debuts in December.
Wide-screen projection (Cinemascope)
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumously
is introduced.
published Philosophical Investigations.
“American Bandstand” premieres on
television.
A polio epidemic strikes 47,500
Americans.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
William Inge’s Picnic (wins Pulitzer).
Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy.
John Patrick’s Teahouse of the August
Moon.
Howard Teichmann’s and George
Kaufman’s The Solid Gold Cadillac.
Eugene O’Neill dies (b. 1888).
30
Musical Wonderful Town reunites
composer Leonard Bernstein with
lyricists Betty Comden and Adolphe
Green.
1954
Joseph Papp founds New York
Shakepeare Festival, considered the
most significant of the Off-Broadway
movements.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Robert Oppenheimer, father of atomic
bomb, has security permit withdrawn by
President Eisenhower, having been
accused of being a Communist and
holding up development of hydrogen
bomb (23 Dec.).
Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie
March.
James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the
Mountain.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
French semiotician Roland Barthes’s
Writing Degree Zero.
Stalin dies (b. 1879); Nikita Khrushchev
appointed First Secretary of the
Communist Party.
Daniel Boorstin’s The Genius of American Ceasefire in Korea. Korean War ends
Politics.
soon after.
Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History.
Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the
Human Female.
Dylan Thomas dies in New York.
Martial law imposed in East Berlin.
Buckminster Fuller designs geodesic
dome.
Federal budget deficit hits high to date
for peacetime: $9.4 billion.
U.S. Supreme Court rules in Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka that
segregation in public schools violates
the fourteenth amendment.
Fidel Castro leads abortive coup against
Batista in Cuba (26 July).
Elizabeth II crowned Queen of England.
Anouilh’s play The Lark.
William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies.
British poet John Betjeman’s A Few Late
Chrysanthemums.
J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings.
Kingsley Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim.
Milwaukee Repertory Theater formed.
George Abbott’s musical Pajama Game
introduces composing team of Richard
Adler and Jerry Ross, choreographer
Bob Fosse, and producer Harold Prince
to Broadway.
Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker with
Ruth Gordon.
31
Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera The Saint of
Bleecker Street wins Pulitzer (1955).
1955
Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof directed by Elia Kazan wins both
Critics’ Circle Award and Pulitzer.
Twenty-six comic book publishers
voluntarily adopt censorship code to
eliminate vulgar or obscene comics.
Jonas Salk invents an injectible vaccine
for infantile paralysis. After schoolchildren are vaccinated in Pittsburgh, a
nationwide program begins.
Senator Joseph McCarthy forms a
Permanent Investigating Subcommittee
for hearings on Communist activities in
the government.
Elvis Presley makes first professional
recording at nineteen and achieves some
success with “That’s All Right, Mama”
and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”
First “TV dinners” are sold by Swanson
Co.
Hemingway wins Pulitzer for literature.
Marlon Brando wears denim jeans and
leather jacket in The Wild One, setting
new fashion.
Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems.
David Potter’s People of Plenty.
Newport Jazz Festival founded.
Veterans Day (11 Nov.) proclaimed
holiday to honor all who fought for
nation.
Jasper John’s painting Flag.
Disneyland, America’s most popular
amusement/theme park, is founded in
Anaheim, California.
French sociologist Jacques Ellul’s
Technological Society.
U.S. ratifies mutual security treaty with
South Korea (26 Jan.).
French defeat at Dien Bien Phu ends
Indochinese War.
Rebellion breaks out against French
control in Algeria.
Death of Spanish playwright Jacinto
Benavente (b. 1866).
Terence Rattigan’s play Separate Tables.
Enid Bagnold’s play The Chalk Garden.
Death of artist Henri Matisse (b. 1869).
Federico Fellini’s film La Strada.
U.S. begins economic aid to Laos,
Cambodia, and South Vietnam.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Williamstown Theatre Festival founded.
Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge
and A Memory of Two Mondays.
William Inge’s Bus Stop with Kim Stanley,
directed by Harold Clurman.
32
Jerome Lawrence’s and Robert E. Lee’s
Inherit the Wind (premiered in Dallas),
based on Scopes Monkey Trial and with
Paul Muni and Ed Begley, becomes
popular court drama.
George Abbott’s, Richard Adler’s and
Jerry Ross’s Damn Yankees.
S. N. Behrman and Harold Rome
musical, Fanny.
Death of Robert E. Sherwood (b. 1896).
Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
A bus boycott of black citizens led by
Martin Luther King, begins in
Montgomery, Alabama (1 Dec.).
Albert Einstein dies in Princeton, New
Jersey, aged 76.
The American Federation of Labor and
the Congress of Industrial Organizations
unify under George Meaney, ending their
rivalry.
First electrical synthesizer built in
Princeton, New Jersey.
Davy Crockett craze results in $100
million industry, which includes sales of
Crockett caps, raccoon coats, and even
ladies’ panties.
Film Marty with Ernest Borgnine opens.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
French anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss’s Tristes Tropiques.
Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet
American.
UN report reveals that slavery persists
in some countries in South America, the
Middle East and Southeast Asia.
Agatha Christie’s play Witness for the
Prosecution.
Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.
The Village Voice, an alternative New
Salvador Dali’s painting Last Supper.
York newspaper, appears.
Walter Lippmann’s The Public Philosophy.
Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in
America.
James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son.
Herbert Mancuse’s Eros and Civilization.
C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career
of Jim Crow.
Will Herberg’s Protestant–Catholic–Jew.
1956
Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which
O’Neill ordered to be withheld until 25
years after his death or until all of the
models for his characters had died, is
performed for the first time. It garners a
Pulitzer the following year.
Alan Jay Lerner’s and Frederick Loewe’s
My Fair Lady, based on Shaw’s Pygmalion,
is produced with Rex Harrison and Julie
Andrews.
Philadelphia Drama Guild founded.
Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform.
Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of
Positive Thinking.
An oral vaccine against polio is
developed by Arthur Sabin.
Elvis Presley releases Heartbreak Hotel,
Khrushchev’s “secret speech.”
the first of his string of more than 170 hit
singles and 80 hit albums.
33
World heavyweight boxing champ Rocky
Marciano retires, having won all fortynine bouts of his career (April).
The Diary of Anne Frank, by Frances
Allen Ginsberg’s long experimental poem,
Goodrich and Albert Hackett, wins
Howl, decribed as an elegy of the
Pulitzer.
American dream, is the first major work
of the Beatnik cultural/literary
movement.
Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey give last By mid-50s bust lines are accentuated in
circus performance under canvas big top. figure-hugging evening wear. Suits and
dresses are the fashion in women’s daily
wear.
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with
C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite.
Bert Lahr and E.G. Marshall stuns
William H. Whyte’s The Organization of
audiences and alters course of modern
Man.
theatre.
Walter Kaufman, ed., Existentialism from
Dostoevsky to Sartre.
Frank Loesser’s musical The Most Happy
Fella is milestone with blending of opera
and musical comedy style.
Atomic Energy Commission develop
atomic powered rockets.
John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.
Soviets crush rebellion in Hungary.
Biggest anti-Communist uprising since
1953 when Polish workers riot at
industrial fair in Poznan (28 June).
Egyptian President Nasser seizes Suez
Canal (26 July).
Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal
released.
Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt’s
The Visit.
Irish pundit and playwright Brendan
Behan’s The Quare Fellow.
Bertolt Brecht dies (b. 1898).
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Martin Luther King emerges as civil
rights leader.
Edwin O’Connor’s novel The Last Hurrah,
based on the life of Boston Mayor James
Michael Curley.
1957
West Side Story, a collaboration of
Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and
Stephen Sondheim, opens.
34
The Burlesque Artists Association has
license revoked.
William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the
Stairs.
William Saroyan’s The Cave Dwellers.
Detroit Repertory Theatre founded.
Jujamcyn Theatre chain begins with
purchase of New York’s St. James
Theatre.
Grace Metalious’s bestseller Peyton Place.
Congress enacts Civil Rights Act, the first
civil rights legislation since
Reconstruction. It prohibits
discrimination in public places based on
race, color, religion, or national origin.
Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) forms, led by Martin
Luther King and dedicated to non-violent
protest of racial discrimination.
Labor leader James “Jimmy” Hoffa
becomes head of the Teamsters’ Union.
First plastic Frisbee is introduced.
Althea Gibson becomes the first black
player to win the Wimbledon tennis title
(6 July).
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a semiautobiographical novel and the most
popular contribution to the Beat
Generation, is published.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger
is described by critics as “an angry
young man piece”.
French thief and playwright Jean Genet’s
The Balcony.
Sputnik launched by Russians.
Milovan Dijilas’s New Class published.
Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, his
first play.
French send in military to combat ALN
(Armeé de Liberation), fighting for
Algerian independence (31 Jan.).
Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.
Harold Macmillan becomes Great
Britain’s Prime Minister.
1958
35
James Gould Cozzen’s By Love Possessed.
Dwight MacDonald’s Memoirs of a
Revolutionist.
Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic
Childhood.
Meredith Willson’s The Music Man with
Leon Festinger’s A Theory of Cognitive
Israel withdraws from Sinai Peninsula
Robert Preston and Barbara Cook.
Dissonance.
and hands over Gaza Strip to United
Nations.
Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus
Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Darndest
Albert Camus wins Nobel Prize for
Descending.
Things.
Literature.
Look Homeward, Angel, adapted by Ketti Richard Starkweather begins his
Russian modernist Boris Pasternak’s
Frings, wins Pulitzer (opened Nov. 1957). murderous rampage across the Midwest novel Doctor Zhivago published.
(Jan.). He will kill eleven before
apprehension by police on 30 January.
Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet first The U.S. Supreme Court orders Little
Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party.
produced (with Eric Porter, Helen Hayes, Rock High School in Arkansas to
Max Frisch’s Biedermann and the
Kim Stanley).
admit blacks (12 Sept.).
Firebugs.
Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey.
Elmer Rice’s adaptation of Hamlet, Cue
The U.S. nuclear submarine, Nautilus,
Edmund Hillary reaches South Pole with
for Passion, is produced.
passes under ice cap at the North Pole,
New Zealand expedition, beating rival
showing efficacy of shortening
British group by seventeen days (3 Jan.).
commercial sea routes.
Dore Schary’s Sunrise at Campobello.
U.S. unemployment reaches a postwar
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
high of more than 5.1 million, and the
forms in Britain (17 Feb.).
Department of Labor reports that a
record 3.1 million receive unemployment
insurance benefits.
The Pleasure of His Company by Samuel
Taylor and Cornelia Otis Skinner.
U.S. announces start of manned space
program, Mercury. U.S. government
establishes National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) to compete
with Soviet Union on space exploration.
Nikita Khrushchev succeeds Bulganin as
premier while retaining position of First
Secretary of Communist Party, thereby
taking full control of USSR in first return
to one-man rule since Stalin’s death in
1953 (27 March).
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Williams’s The Garden District (retitled
Suddenly Last Summer; film 1959).
William Gibson’s Two for the Seesaw with
Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft.
Critic George Jean Nathan dies (b. 1882).
36
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
The hula hoop, the biggest toy fad in
history, is introduced.
The Guggenheim Museum, designed by
Frank Lloyd Wright, opens in New York
City.
Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional
Society.
John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent
Society.
Martin Luther King’s Stride Toward
Freedom.
John Rawls’s “Justice as Fairness.”
William Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s
The Ugly American.
Film of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof, directed by Richard Brooks.
Truman Capote’s novel Breakfast at
Tiffany’s.
King Faisel of Iraq, his heir and premier
Nuri-es-Said are assassinated (14 July).
Racial tensions erupt in violence when
black and white youths battle in
Nottingham, England (23 Aug.).
Pope Pius XII dies and is succeeded by
Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who
takes the name Pope John XXIII (9 Oct.).
Beginning of Great Leap Forward in
China (until 1960). A period of radical
change to cultivate modernization, it
proves disastrous.
Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in
Havana.
Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning.
Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart.
Max Ernst’s painting Après Moi le
Sommeil.
European Common Market established.
Irishman Brendan Behan writes The
Hostage.
Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
Peter Shaffer’s play Five Finger
Exercise.
1959
37
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun,
showing the tribulations of a struggling
black family, opens to boisterous critical
and popular praise (with Sidney Poitier,
Ruby Dee, Diana Sands).
The San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded
by R.G. Davis and using techniques from
the commedia dell’arte, is started.
Mixing radical politics with farce and
invective, they stage crude parables and
in later years Vietnam protest plays.
Dallas Theater Center founded.
Launching in the U.S. of the first atomic
submarine (9 June), and the first atomicpowered cargo ship, Savannah (21 July).
First Barbie doll introduced in California.
Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story premieres
in Berlin.
Jack Gelber’s The Connection staged by
Living Theatre.
Poet Archibald Macleish wins Pulitzer
for his verse play J.B. (opened 1958 with
Christopher Plummer, Raymond Massey,
Pat Hingle).
Lindsay’s and Crouse’s, Rodgers’s and
Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music (with
Mary Martin).
Mary Rodger’s and Marshall Barer’s OffBroadway musical Once Upon a Mattress
with Carol Burnett.
Gypsy created by team of Jerome
Robbins, Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim,
and Arthur Laurents (with Ethel
Merman).
Fiorello! (Jerome Weidman, George
Abbott, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick)
with Tom Bosley as La Guardia (wins
1960 Pulitzer).
The “Twist” dance is introduced.
Alaska and Hawaii, under U.S. territorial C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures.
control since 1912 and 1898 respectively,
achieve state status.
Xerox introduces its first copier.
Singer and teen idol Buddy Holly dies in
a plane crash at age twenty-two (3 Feb.).
Blues singer Billie Holiday dies at age
forty-four.
Harold Rosenberg’s Tradition of the New.
Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death.
William A. Williams’s The Tragedy of
American Diplomacy.
C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological
Imagination.
William Burroughs’s underground novel
The Naked Lunch.
Robert Lowell’s poetry collection Life
Studies.
William Faulkner’s novel The Mansion.
Philip Roth’s novel Goodbye, Columbus.
After Batista flees, Castro takes control
and becomes premier of Cuba (2 Jan.).
Mrs. Indira Gandhi, only daughter of
India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru,
elected President of ruling Congress
Party (2 Feb.).
Resistance to Chinese rule in Tibet leads
to revolt. Chinese forces crush rebellion,
and the Dalai Lama flees to India (13–27
March).
Eamon De Valera resigns as premier and
becomes President of Eire.
Charles De Gaulle becomes President of
France (17 June).
Eugène Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros.
Jean Genet’s The Blacks.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth directed by
Kazan with Paul Newman and Geraldine
Page (a work in progress had been seen
in Florida in 1956; film 1962).
William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker
(with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke).
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Jasper Johns’s painting Numbers in Color. John Arden’s play Serjeant Musgrave’s
Dance.
Hawaii becomes 50th state.
Paddy Chayefsky’s The Tenth Man.
1960
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
38
John F. Kennedy elected thirty-fifth (and
youngest) President.
Association of Producing Artists founded. D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
is ruled not obscene, and therefore
mailable, by the U.S. Court of Appeals in
New York (25 March).
Asolo Center for the Performing Arts
Alan Freed, coiner of the term
established.
“rock’n’roll” and one of the most famous
early disc jockeys, is arrested in “Payola
scam.” It is a charge of commercial
bribery, which accuses Freed of
accepting money from record companies
in exchange for playing their releases on
air (19 May).
Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park opens.
Charles Van Doren, star contestant of TV
quiz show “21,” arrested for perjury,
based on statements that quiz shows
provided answers to contestants prior to
competition (17 July).
Albee’s The Zoo Story has its American
The 23rd Amendment proposed by
premiere in New York (14 Jan.). Also, his Congress to grant rights of voting and
Fam and Yam and The Sandbox.
representation to the District of
Columbia. It is ratified in 1961.
Films Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain
Resnais) and La Dolce Vita (Fellini)
released.
Pope John XXIII calls Ecumenical
Council, first since 1870.
American U-2 spy plane, piloted by
Francis Gary Powers, shot down over
Russia.
Austrian-born British art historian E.H.
Gombrich’s Art and Illusion published.
Hans Gadamer’s Truth and Method
appears.
Start of civil disobedience campaign
against pass laws in South Africa. Sixtyseven blacks are killed at Sharpeville
(21 March).
Nigeria achieves independence within
Commonwealth (1 Oct.).
After an Actors’ Equity Strike, twentytwo legitimate Broadway theatres close,
the first time since 1919 (12–13 June).
Williams’s Period of Adjustment.
Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) forms during lunchcounter sit-in in Greensboro, North
Carolina.
Congress passes Civil Rights Act of 1960,
addressing voter-registration practices.
Because it is not enforced, it is virtually
ineffective.
Soft drink manufacturers introduce
aluminum cans. Pop-top cans follow
in 1963.
1960s. The use of birth control pills by
women grows widespread.
Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and The
Dumb Waiter.
Terence Rattigan’s Ross.
39
Tom Jones’s and Harvey Schmidt’s
Lionel Bart’s Oliver at London’s New
The Fantastiks opens (3 May) at OffTheatre.
Broadway’s Sullivan St. Playhouse;
still playing there in 1999.
The rock’n’roll phenomenon quickly
W.W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth.
sweeps Broadway with the production
of Michael Stewart, Charles Strouse, and
Lee Adams’s Bye Bye Birdie, featuring TV
personality Dick Van Dyke.
Meredith Willson’s The Unsinkable
Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd.
Molly Brown with Tammy Grimes.
Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology.
Bruno Bettelheim’s The Informed Heart.
Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Wisdom.
Angus Campbell et al., The American
Voter.
S.M. Lipset’s Political Man.
John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These
Truths.
Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and
Bobby Fischer, aged sixteen, defends U.S.
Robert Goulet star in Camelot at The
chess title.
Majestic Theatre. The musical, based on
T.H. White’s The Once and Future King,
later becomes a successful film.
DATES
1961
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
40
Theatre clubs and coffeehouses like
Caffe Cino and La MaMa Experimental
Theater Club open, providing an
alternative outlet for avant-garde artists
and dramatists.
Records reveal that Special Services
Division of U.S. Army in Europe had
censored, cut, or rewritten Broadway
plays “to keep them clean,” without
notification to the authors of the
Dramatists Guild.
The Children’s Theatre Company, a
Minneapolis-based children’s theatre, is
created by John Clark Donahue; New
York based Theatreworks/USA also
established as touring children’s theatre
company.
The Theatre Communications Group
(TCG) founded in New York City as
umbrella organization for not-for-profit
theatres.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
The film Ben Hur wins record ten Oscars.
Completion of Robert Motherwell’s huge
sequence of paintings, Elegy to the
Spanish Republic.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho premieres.
Pacemaker to regulate heartbeat
developed.
Edward Hopper’s painting SecondStory Sunlight.
The Peace Corps initiated by President
Bloodless coup overthrows junta in El
Kennedy (1 March).
Salvador (25 January).
Hemingway kills himself with his own
gun (2 July).
A campaign of civil disobedience in
Ceylon (30 Jan.).
New York Yankee Roger Maris breaks
Babe Ruth’s 1927 record of sixty home
runs, with sixty-one (1 Oct.).
Trial of Nazi Adolph Eichmann begins in
Jerusalem. He is convicted and
sentenced to death (11 April).
JFK reaffirms commitment to South
Vietnam (14 Dec.).
Anti-Castro Cuban activists, trained by
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, land in
failed invasion at Bay of Pigs, Cuba, with
U.S. military supplies and support
facilities (17 April).
Tad Mosel’s All the Way Home.
First U.S. spaceman Alan Shephard
rockets 116.5 miles up in a 302-mile trip.
Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn
Kennedy publicly commits U.S. to
opens, beginning his reign as Broadway’s sending man to the moon by end of
top playwright.
decade.
Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, a
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy
biography of martyred saint Sir Thomas popularizes the short, tailored 2-piece
More, is imported from London, and
suit and pillbox hat created by Oleg
stars Paul Scofield in the lead role.
Cassini.
Williams’s The Night of the Iguana wins
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
Drama Critics’ Award (film 1964).
Erving Goffman’s Asylums.
41
1962
Construction of Berlin Wall begins
(17–18 April).
Two U.S. army helicopter companies
with 400 men arrive in Saigon (11 Dec.).
Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.
John Osborne’s Luther.
South African playwright Athol Fugard’s
The Blood Knot.
Harold Pinter’s The Collection.
Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen.
John Whiting’s The Devils.
Pinter introduced to Broadway with
Freedom Riders come to the South to
Russian Yuri Gagarin becomes first man
The Caretaker.
help expose segregation in bus terminals. in space, orbiting the Earth for 108
minutes in Vostok 1 (April).
How to Succeed in Business Without
Lionel Trilling’s “On the Teaching of
European film openings include François
Really Trying, by Abe Burrows, Willie
Modern Literature.”
Truffaut’s Jules and Jim; Vittorio De
Gilbert, Jack Weinstock, and Frank
Ernest Nagel’s The Structure of Science.
Sica’s Two Women; Tony Richardson’s A
Loesser (wins Pulitzer).
Robert Dahl’s Who Governs?
Taste of Honey; Luis Buñuel’s Virdiana.
William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich.
Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious, with Davis, Premiere of Robert Rossen’s film The
Ruby Dee, Godfrey Cambridge, and
Hustler with Jackie Gleason and Paul
Alan Alda.
Newman.
Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet
“Century 21 Exposition,” a world’s fair
John Glenn becomes first American to
Theater founded. It utilizes politics and
for the space age, is held in Seattle,
orbit earth.
puppets for trenchant social
Washington (21 April).
commentary and anti-war polemic.
The Zoo Story by Albee and Call Me By
The 24th Amendment is proposed by
During Cuban Missile Crisis, President
My Rightful Name by Michael Shurtleff
Congress to eliminate the poll tax. It is
Kennedy demands withdrawal of Soviet
are banned from performance at a high
ratified 23 January 1964.
missiles from Cuba. An air and naval
school in Rockport, Massachusetts, for
quarantine is ordered. Khrushchev later
undercurrents of homosexuality in the
agrees to dismantle and remove Soviet
former, racial triangles in the latter.
rockets, and Kennedy agrees not to
invade Cuba.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is
built in New York City.
The 400th birthday of Shakespeare is
celebrated across the country. Thirty of
his thirty-seven plays are performed
nationwide (23 April).
Great Lakes Theater Festival begins
(14 Aug.).
42
Arthur Kopit’s Oh, Dad, Poor Dad,
Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m
Feelin’ So Sad (Off-Broadway).
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,
with Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Federal troops sent to University of
Mississippi to force school to enroll
African American James Meredith.
American labor leader Cesar Chavez
organizes California grape pickers. He
forms the farm workers’ association
(UFW).
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions.
Michael Harrington’s The Other America.
Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and
Freedom. Marshall McLuhan’s The
Gutenberg Galaxy.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest.
Katherine Ann Porter’s Ship of Fools.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
publish Port Huron Statement.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
U.S. loans $100 million to UN to help
resolve its financial crisis.
Irish Republican Army announces
suspension of campaign of violence
begun in 1956 against Northern Ireland
government (26 Feb.).
Jamaica gains independence in
Commonwealth (6 Aug.).
Uganda gains independence in
Commonwealth (9 Oct.).
Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden
Notebook.
Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork
Robert Rauschenberg’s painting Barge.
Orange.
Andy Warhol’s silkscreen Marilyn Monroe First James Bond film, Dr. No, premieres.
and painting Green Coca Cola Bottles.
Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns, with
Algeria is granted independence, ending
Jason Robards, Jr. and Sandy Dennis.
Algerian War.
Thornton Wilder’s Plays for Bleecker Street.
Second Vatican Council, 1962–65,
produces sixteen documents outlining
reforms and modernization of Roman
Catholic practice.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack.
the Forum stars Zero Mostel and features
songs by Stephen Sondheim, his first
composed musical.
1963
The Minnesota Theater Company
founded as alternative to New York
commercial theatre.
The Free Southern Theatre, inspired by
the Civil Rights Movement, founded by
John O’Neal, Gilbert Moses, and Doris
Derby.
Open Theatre, an experimental Off-Off
Broadway acting company, created
by Joseph Chaikin.
Medgar Evers, Field Secretary for the
NAACP, is shot and killed in Jackson,
Mississippi. His assailant will not be
convicted until 1993.
Black civil rights demonstration;
Reverend Martin Luther King delivers
the “I Have a Dream” speech (29 Aug.).
President Kennedy shot to death in
motorcade in Dallas, Texas by Lee
Harvey Oswald (22 Nov.).
43
Goodspeed Opera House (Connecticut)
opens as home of American musicals.
March for racial equality by 200,000 in
Detroit, Michigan.
The Guthrie Theater founded in
Minneapolis.
The characteristic 60s clothes emerge,
featuring miniskirts, stretch pants, hiphugger bell-bottomed trousers, and
collarless jackets.
Author Betty Friedan publishes The
Feminine Mystique, a seminal work in the
continuing women’s movement.
Mary McCarthy’s The Group.
Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan’s
Beyond the Melting Pot.
Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the
Birmingham Jail.”
Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of
Death.
Seattle Repertory Theatre founded.
Trinity [Square] Repertory Company of
Providence, Rhode Island, founded.
Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop
Here Anymore. This and subsequent
Williams plays produced (some ten)
are largely unsuccessful.
Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything.
Peter Shaffer’s The Private Ear and the
Public Eye.
Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King.
Arabs in Iraq resume civil war with
Kurds (10 June).
President Kennedy makes attack on
Communism during visit to West Berlin
(26 June).
Scandal over security by involvement of
Secretary of State for War John Profumo
with model Christine Keeler brings
about British Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan’s resignation (10 October).
Black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela
brought from jail to stand trial for
treason (3 Dec.).
German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s
controversial The Deputy premieres in
Berlin.
Tony Richardson’s film Tom Jones.
Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence.
Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life.
The Beatles score first hit with “I Want to
Hold Your Hand.”
DATES
1964
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
44
Langston Hughes’s Tambourines to Glory. Poet Adrienne Rich’s Snapshots of a
Daughter-in-Law.
Harnick’s and Bock’s musical She Loves
Poet Sylvia Plath publishes a semiMe.
autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.
Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park (over
First push-button telephones introduced.
1,500 performances).
Proletarian dramatist Clifford Odets dies Eastman Kodak introduces Instamatic
at age fifty-seven.
camera.
Imamu Amiri Baraka’s (né LeRoi Jones)
Comedian Lenny Bruce arrested for
The Dutchman, called the “best one-act
indecency and for using foul language at
play in America” by Norman Mailer,
Greenwich Village café.
receives the Off-Broadway Award for
Best American Play of 1963–64.
The Black Arts Repertory founded.
Beatlemania sweeps U.S. as their albums
sell 2,000,000 copies in a month and they
embark on national tour.
Living Theater proprietors Julian Beck
Three civil rights activists – Michael
and his wife Judith Malina are convicted Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James
of impeding federal officers from closing Chaney – murdered in Mississippi.
the theatre down.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Clashes erupt over disputed rights in
Panama Canal (9 Jan.).
Palestinian Liberation Organization
(PLO) founded (June).
After North Vietnamese gunboats fire on
U.S. ships in Gulf of Tonka, U.S. Senate
passes resolution authorizing President
Johnson to repel armed attacks and
prevent further aggression (7 June).
Actors Theatre of Louisville,
Martin Luther King awarded Nobel Peace Iris Murdoch and J.P. Priestley adapt
Hartford Stage Company,
Prize. At age thirty-five, he is youngest
Murdoch’s novel, A Severed Head, for
Missouri Repertory Theatre, and South
recipient of all time.
the stage.
Coast Repertory – all founded.
Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloan.
Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade.
Funny Girl (Jule Styne and Bob Merrill)
Free Speech Movement begins among
John Osborne’s Inadmissable Evidence at
makes star of Barbra Streisand with her
Berkeley students under Mario Savio,
London’s Royal Court.
portrayal of Fanny Brice.
Jack Weinberg, and others.
Bock/Harnick musical Fiddler on the Roof The Beatles arrive in New York to
Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun.
stars Zero Mostel with scenery by Boris ecstatic reception (8 Feb.).
Aronson.
O’Neill Theater Center founded in
Connecticut.
45
Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston to
become heavyweight champion of the
world (25 Feb.).
Arthur Miller’s After the Fall at ANTA
Kitty Genovese murdered in Queens,
Theatre-Washington Square.
New York, while thirty-seven witnesses
Muriel Resnik’s Any Wednesday.
do nothing to prevent crime. Case
Frank D. Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses.
becomes searing indictment of city
Murray Schisgal’s Luv.
residents’ fear of becoming involved in
such attacks (13 March).
James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie.
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, possibly most
expensive structure ever built at $325
million, constructed in New York City.
Hello, Dolly! by Jerry Herman and
U.S. Office of Criminal Justice established
Michael Stewart, based on Wilder play,
to study and improve criminal justice
opens with Carol Channing, who will tour process.
successfully with the musical in the l990s.
A gigantic flop, Kelly, lasts only one
Saul Bellow’s Herzog.
performance in New York and costs
Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.
$650,000.
Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act.
Robert Lowell’s The Old Glory produced
at St. Clement’s Church, New York.
New Codes of Ethics of the League of
New York Theatres dealing with fiscal
details of producing created.
Sidney Kingsley named new President of
The Dramatists Guild, Inc.
Actors’ Equity stages a one-day strike.
Miller’s Incident at Vichy, William
Hanley’s Slow Dance on the Killing
Ground, Simon’s The Odd Couple, and
Fiddler on the Roof, all designated Best
Plays for 1964–65.
Clifford Geertz’s “Ideology as a Cultural
System.”
Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University.
Philip E. Converse’s “The Nature of Belief
Systems in Mass Publics.”
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Martin Luther King’s Why We Can’t Wait.
World’s first discotheque, the “Whiskeya-Go-Go,” opens in Los Angeles.
Riots in Harlem.
Roger Sessions’s opera Montezuma
premieres in West Berlin.
Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding
Media.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Plan to export Hello, Dolly! to South
Africa vetoed after NAACP expresses
its disapproval.
Sam Shepard’s Cowboy and The Rock
Garden receive Off-Broadway Obies.
1965
46
The American Conservatory Theatre
(now Theater) founded by Willliam Ball
at Pittsburgh Playhouse. It relocates to
San Francisco in 1967.
With the purchase and renovation of the
Palace Theatre, the Nederlander family
from Detroit bring new theatrical dynasty
to Broadway.
Jon Jory and Harlan Kleiman open Long
Wharf Theatre, a non-profit resident
theatre in New Haven, Conn.
National Playwrights Conference
established by George C. White.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead.
Poet Marianne Moore writes The Arctic Ox.
Sidney Poitier becomes first black actor
to win Oscar for Best Actor, for his role in
Lilies of the Field.
Jimmy Hoffa brings all truckers under a
single Teamsters’ Union contract.
Lyndon Johnson, elected in 1964, unveils President Lyndon Johnson commits
his Great Society Program.
troops to Vietnam.
Black leader Malcolm X shot dead in
Harlem (21 Feb.).
More than fifty blacks injured during
brutal attack by sheriff’s posse and state
troopers in Selma, Alabama (7–9 March).
Blacks riot for six days in Watts section
of Los Angeles. National Guard called in
to restore order.
Neil Simon’s highly successful The Odd
Martin Luther King heads procession of
Couple opens with Art Carney and Walter 4,000 civil rights demonstrators from
Matthau.
Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to
deliver petition on racial grievances
(21 March).
El Teatro Campesino, an agit prop
troupe, emerges with activist Luis
Valdez. Situated in San Juan Bautiste,
group devises new theatrical form, the
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Mass anti-war demonstrations
(15–18 Oct.).
Rolling Stones gain great popularity
with “Satisfaction.”
Winston Churchill dies at age ninety-one.
U.S. begins retaliatory bombing raids on
North Vietnam (7 Feb.). On 2 March U.S.
declares combatant status.
Nigerian author Wole Soyinka’s novel
The Interpreters.
acto, combining elements of Aztec
mythology and contemporary social
life in the barrio. Concerned with
working-class politics and factory
disputes, some dramas are staged
directly on picket lines.
Baraka’s The Toilet faces censorship
problems in Boston and Los Angeles.
James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner has
brief run on Broadway.
Ed Bullins’s Clara’s Old Man.
Congress establishes National
Endowment for the Arts to make grants
to theatrical groups and projects.
47
Peter Brook’s production of Marat/Sade
imported to New York; becomes
influential theatre piece.
Roundabout Theatre Company forms.
A Contemporary Theatre founded.
Studio Arena Theatre forms.
Abe Burrows’s Cactus Flower with
Lauren Bacall.
The annual gross for the 1964–65 season
on Broadway is $50,462,765.
Major Edward White leaves Gemini 4
capsule for twenty minutes, becoming
first American to walk in space.
Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming.
Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister
George.
Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy.
Edward Bond’s Saved.
Joe Orton’s Loot.
25th Amendment proposed to establish
Czech dramatist and future Prime
system for succession for presidency
Minister Vaclav Havel’s The
and for replacement of the vice president. Memorandum.
It is ratified 10 February 1967.
Congress passes Voting Rights Act in
August, outlawing literacy tests and other
voter-registration tests.
Some 240 million radios and 61.8 million
TV sets are in use in U.S.
Jim Brown sets record for most lifetime
touchdowns (126).
Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance.”
Lionel Trilling’s Beyond Culture.
Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory
of Syntax.
Malcolm X’s Autobiography.
Harvey Cox’s The Secular City.
Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored
Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
Singer Nat King Cole dies at age forty-five.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
William Alfred’s Hogan’s Goat at the
American Place Theatre.
Producer David Merrick brings Irish
writer Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I
Come! to Broadway.
Man of La Mancha, a vehicle for Richard
Kiley, opens 22 November and runs for
2,238 performances.
48
1966
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, published
posthumously.
Norman Mailer’s American Dream.
Swami Pradhupada founds International
Society of Krishna Consciousness,
Vaisnava devotional movement, in Los
Angeles.
Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Lincoln
Center opens 21 October.
Sam Shepard’s Chicago.
Walter Piston’s Symphony No. 8
Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead.
premieres at Boston’s Symphony Hall.
Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays
on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds premieres
in Houston.
A Delicate Balance, Generation, Cactus
Flower, The Lion in Winter, and Man of La
Mancha designated Best Plays of 1965–66.
The Motion Picture Association replaces
1930 Hayes code with new, concise
guidelines for clarifying films as to
suitability for audiences (20 Sept.).
Robert Wilson starts Byrd Hoffman
U.S. Supreme Court overturns conviction
School for Byrds, an institution to help
of confessed rapist, establishing
children with learning disabilities and
requirements for so-called Miranda
other brain disorders. This work leads to warnings in Miranda v. Arizona.
Deafman Glance (1970), an “opera of
images.”
Yale Repertory Theatre established.
Chicago race riots take 4,200 National
Guardsmen and 533 arrests to quell.
Louis Althusser’s For Marx.
French philospher Michel Foucault’s
The Order of Things and psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits.
U.S. resumes bombing of North Vietnam
after thirty-seven-day pause (31 Jan.).
President Kwame Nkrumah’s
government overthrown in miliatry coup
in Ghana (24 Feb.).
INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center
founded in New York.
John Kander/Fred Ebb/Joe Masteroff
musical Cabaret, based on Berlin Stories
by Christopher Isherwood and I Am a
Camera by John Van Druten, opens at the
Broadhurst Theatre on 20 November,
produced by Hal Prince and with Joel
Grey as decadent master of ceremonies.
James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter with
Robert Preston and Rosemary Harris.
Jean-Claude Van Itallie’s America Hurrah
opens at Off-Broadway Pocket Theatre.
49
Nightclub comic Lennie Bruce found
dead of a drug overdose.
Death of showman Billy Rose (b. 1899).
A Delicate Balance, You Know I Can’t
Hear You When the Water’s Running, and
The Apple Tree named Best Plays of
1966–67.
Season musicals include Sweet Charity,
Mame, The Apple Tree, and I Do! I Do!
1967
Ron Tavel’s The Gorilla Queen premieres
at Theatre of the Ridiculous.
Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders at the
Broadhurst Theatre.
National Organization of Women (NOW)
founded by Betty Friedan.
Women’s fashion geared toward youth
and features the “boy look” popularized
by model Twiggy.
Clashes between police and students at
Barcelona University (27 April).
Israel attacks Jordan in the Hebron
area (13 Nov.).
Bill Russell becomes first black head
coach of any professional sport team
when he is named head coach of the
Boston Celtics.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckerman’s
The Social Construction of Reality.
Robert Lane’s “The Decline of Politics
and Ideology in a Knowledgeable
Society.”
Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Yellow and
Red Brushstrokes.
TV science fiction serial Star Trek begins.
Screen version of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf, directed by Mike Nichols
with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Civil rights rally in Jackson, Mississippi,
marred by violence when James
Meredith – the first black to attend
University of Mississippi – is shot and
wounded (26 June).
The Monterey Pop Festival, the first large
rock gathering, held at Monterey,
California.
Pravda (“Truth,” founded 1912) has 6
million readers in Soviet Union.
Floods ravage Northern Italy, destroying
art treasures in Venice and Florence.
French deconstructionist Jacques
Derrida’s On Grammatology and Writing
and Difference.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Hair (the “American Tribal Love-Rock
Musical”) opens Off-Broadway at Joseph
Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival
Theater (29 Oct.). It closes 10 December
after forty-nine performances but
reopens 29 April 1968, on Broadway
with house lights dimmed to make cast’s
nudity less conspicuous.
Broadway set designer David Hays
founds National Theatre for the Deaf.
The Negro Ensemble Company
established.
50
Albee’s Everything in the Garden.
Robert Anderson’s You Know I Can’t
Hear You When the Water’s Running.
New York’s Classic Stage Company (CSC)
founded.
Magic Theatre founded in San Francisco.
Mark Taper Forum created (Los Angeles).
Theatre Development Fund established
to assist “meritorious but risky plays”
on Broadway.
Barbara Garson’s Macbird!, satire on
Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy’s
assassination, opens Off-Broadway
before moving to Garrick Theatre.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
U.S. Antarctic Mountaineering Expedition The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam
scales Vinsear Massif, a 16,864-foot peak, reaches 380,000 (1 Jan.).
on Sentinel Range of the Ellsworth
Highland.
The radical, revolutionary Black Panther
Party organized in Oakland, California,
by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.
Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual.
John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New
Industrial State.
Rolling Stone magazine begins
publication in November.
Over 100,000 march through New York
and assemble at UN headquarters to
protest Vietnam War (15 April).
Beijing put under military rule (11 Feb.).
Ibo eastern region of Nigeria secedes as
Biafra (30 May).
Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking.
Peter Nichols’s A Day in the Death of
Joe Egg.
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead.
Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy.
Six-Day War begins between United Arab
Republic (UAR) and Israel (5 June).
William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Colombian author Gabriel García
Nat Turner.
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Summer riots (Detroit, Newark) in over
100 cities leave forty-one dead, 4,000
arrested, and 5,000 homeless.
Revolutionary Che Guevara killed by
government troops in Bolivia.
David Hockney’s painting A Bigger
Splash.
Albee’s A Delicate Balance wins Pulitzer.
1968
Mike Nichol’s film The Graduate, starring
Dustin Hoffman, released.
51
I Never Sang for My Father, The Price, and
Plaza Suite among best plays of 1967–68.
Richard Foreman creates OntologicalCrimes of violence up 57% since 1960.
Hysteric Theatre that eschews plot
conventions, characters, or themes for
an intimate representation of the
psyche and unconsciousness.
Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band,
Major civil rights legislation prohibits
the first mainstream drama to deal with
racial discrimination in sale or rental of
homosexuality, runs for 1,000
about 80% of U.S. housing (11 March).
performances Off-Broadway.
The Negro Ensemble created.
Ed Bullins’s Goin’ a Buffalo and The
Martin Luther King shot to death in
Electronic Nigger.
Memphis (4 April); presidential hopeful
Robert Kennedy assassinated at
Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles
(5 June).
The New York Street Theater Caravan
The Poor People’s March, a
founded by Marketa Kimball and Richard demonstration with its final destination
Levy, a troupe oriented to working-class in Washington, D.C. and led by the
audiences.
Reverend Ralph Abernathy, begins
(2 May).
Jay Presson Allen’s adaption of Muriel
James Watson’s The Double Helix.
Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
with Zoe Caldwell.
Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope,
with James Earl Jones and Jane
Alexander, opens at Arena Stage prior to
Broadway, setting a new trend for play
development. Arthur Kopit’s Indians
opens in London and then has U.S.
premiere at Arena.
British playwright Joe Orton hammered
to death by his jealous lover.
Death of artist René Magritte at age
sixty-eight.
Stage censorship dating back to 1737
abolished in England.
Abortive revolution in France (2 May).
Violent protests by militant left-wing
Sorbonne students spreads to civilian
population.
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s
Knowledge and Human Interests.
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s
Structuralism.
The Vietcong’s Tet Offensive gains
ground (Jan.).
Demonstrators in Warsaw, protesting
government interference in cultural
affairs, fight with police and armed
militia men (11 March).
Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half
Loves.
Peter Barnes’s The Ruling Class.
Edward Bond’s Narrow Road to the Deep
North.
John Osborne’s A Hotel in Amsterdam.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Alliance Theatre Company, largest
resident professional theatre in the
southeast, founded in Atlanta.
The National Black Theatre established
by actress/play director Barbara Ann
Teer.
Arthur Miller’s The Price.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
John Updike’s Couples.
U.S. troops massacre village of My Lai,
South Vietnam (16 March).
Richard Nixon elected U.S. President after
Lyndon Johnson decides not to run again
(5 Nov.).
Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space
Odyssey premieres.
Peace talks between U.S. and North
Vietnam in Paris (13 May).
A Federal Grand Jury indicts eight antiwar protesters for conspiracy to start a
riot at 1968 Democratic National
Convention in Chicago.
Neil Armstrong is first man to set foot on
moon (21 July).
Berkeley students and members of
neighboring community attacked as
they try to claim ownership of People’s
Park, built on property owned by
university (15 May).
Incursion into Cambodia.
Omaha Magic Theatre founded in
Nebraska.
52
1969
Repertorio Español formed.
Israel Horwitz’s The Indian Wants the
Bronx.
S. N. Behrman’s final play The Burning
Glass produced.
Tennessee Williams’s In the Bar of a
Tokyo Hotel.
Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in ’69,
improvisational piece based on
Euripides’ The Bacchae, in which actors
remove clothing and mingle with
audience, staged at Performing Garage
in New York.
After opening performance of Che! at
Free Store Theater, criminal court justice
signs warrant for cast, producers, and
crew, on charges of public lewdness,
obscenity, consensual sodomy, and
impairing the morals of minors
(24 March).
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Czech intellectuals produce their “2,000
words,” an appeal to speed up
democratization (27 June).
Catholics clash with police in Northern
Ireland, protesting discrimination by
Protestant majority (5–6 Oct.).
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Organic Theatre Company, known for its
ribald humor and nostalgia for 1950s
sci-fi, founded by Stuart Gordon in
Chicago.
Rioting follows police raid on the
Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar;
it mobilizes gay community and signals
start of gay liberation movement
(27 June).
Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of
Knowledge.
Circle Repertory Company founded.
The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival
held in Bethel, New York. Crowd
estimated at 300,000 to 400,000
(15–18 Aug.).
Congressional Black Caucus forms.
Yasir Arafat elected chairman of PLO
(3 Feb.).
Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, D.C.,
founded.
In the late l960s Miriam Colon’s Puerto
Rican Traveling Theatre brings bilingual
productions to Spanish-speaking
neighborhoods of New York City.
53
Frank MacMahon’s adaptation of
Brendan Behan’s The Hostage hits
Broadway, winning the New York Drama
Critics’ Circle and Tony Awards.
Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta!, an
amalgam of theatrical pastiches, with
the cast fully nude, opens in New York.
Plays of the year include Lonne Elder III’s
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, Lorraine
Hansberry’s posthumous To Be Young,
Gifted, and Black, Leonard Gersh’s
Butterflies are Free, Neil Simon’s Last of
the Red Hot Lovers, Terrence McNally’s
Next, and Sam Shepard’s The Unseen
Hand.
Catholic/Protestant riots in Belfast and
Londonderry (12 Aug.).
North Vietnamese President Ho Chi
Minh dies aged seventy-nine (3 Sept.).
DDT, widely used pesticide, banned in
U.S. because of adverse effects on
environment.
U.S. surgeons implant first artificial heart
in human.
Actress Sharon Tate and four others are Nixon announces withdrawal of
murdered by the Manson cult (9 Aug.).
addtional 35,000 men from South
Vietnam by 15 December (16 Sept.).
The Saturday Evening Post publishes
final issue (until later reborn).
Willy Brandt becomes Chancellor of
West Germany (21 Oct.).
John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy,
“Soccer War,” fought between Honduras
starring Dustin Hoffman and John Voight, and El Salvador.
wins Oscar. It is the first X-rated film to
do so.
Theodore Roszak’s Making of a
Counterculture.
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.
Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena.
Peter Nichols’s The National Health.
Joe Orton’s (posthumous) What the
Butler Saw.
Harold Pinter’s Landscape and Silence.
DATES
1970
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.
Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.
Charles Gordone’s No Place to be
U.S. Army panel casts blame on fourteen
Somebody (opened in 1969) wins Pulitzer. officers for My Lai Massacre in 1968.
Experimental theatre Mabou Mines
created.
Observation of “Earth Day” (22 April).
Manhattan Theatre Club established.
Four anti-Vietnam student protesters are
killed by National Guard at Kent State
University in Ohio (4 May).
Voting age lowered from 21 to 18.
54
New York season includes Robert
Marasco’s Child’s Play, Paul Zindel’s
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-theMoon Marigolds (wins Pulitzer in 1971),
Neil Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady,
Bruce Jay Friedman’s Steambath, Lanford
Wilson’s Lemon Sky, and Sam Shepard’s
Operation Sidewinder.
New Federal Theatre founded.
The first “Jumbo” jet, the Boeing 747,
begins passenger service.
A proposed Middle and Far East tour of
avant-garde playlets produced under the
supervision of Gordon Davidson in Mark
Taper’s Forum “New Theater for Now”
series is canceled by U.S. State
Department because of “unstable and
changing political conditions in the host
countries.”
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Trinidadian playwright and poet Derek
Walcott’s The Dream on Monkey
Mountain and Other Plays.
General Ojukwu’s flight to Ivory Coast
ends Biafran secession from Nigeria and
the civil war (12 Jan.).
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of
24 November 1969 goes into effect,
ratified by forty-five countries (5 March).
Heads of East and West Germany, Willy
Brandt and Willi Stoph, meet in Erfurt,
East Germany – first meeting of the
heads of the two governments since
Germany’s division (19 March).
British Prime Minister Wilson pledges to
keep troops in Northern Ireland as long
as necessary (7 April).
Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful. Death of Portuguese premier Antonio
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato,
Salazar, aged eighty-one (27 July).
eds., The Structuralist Controversy.
The Gingerbread Lady and Follies garner
Best Plays awards for 1970–71.
Broadway musicals include The Last
Sweet Days of Isaac, Purlie, Applause,
Company, The Rothschilds, and Two by
Two.
1971
55
Tom O’Horgan’s staging of the musical
Jesus Christ Superstar helps the rising
star of British composer Andrew Lloyd
Webber.
Jorge Huerta founds Teatro de la
Esperanza (Theatre of Hope) in Santa
Barbara, California.
Rock stars Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin
die of drug overdoses.
Clean Air Act passed, further restricting
emission of pollutants.
Cambodia becomes Khmer Republic
under Lon Nol (9 Oct.).
Death of wartime resistance leader and
later President of France, Charles de
Gaulle, aged eighty (9 Nov.).
Nobel Prize for Literature won by
Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
David Storey’s play Home, a starring
vehicle for Ralph Richardson and John
Gielgud.
Christopher Hampton’s The
Philanthropist, Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth,
and Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half
Loves also part of English season.
Melvin Van Peebles’s highly succesful
Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
film, Sweet Sweetback’s BaaDAsssss starts (posthumous).
“blaxploitation” film trend of early 1970s.
26th Amendment approved by Congress
and ratified (30 June), changing legal
voting age from twenty-one to eighteen.
Army officers led by Major-General Idi
Amin oust President Milton Obote in
military coup in Uganda (25 Jan.). Amin
proclaims himself President on 20
February.
Theatre for the New City and Playwrights 200,000 protesters march in Washington Northern Ireland First Minister
Horizons founded in New York.
against Vietnam War (24 April).
Faulkner invokes emergency powers
of preventive detention without trial and
begins arrests of suspected leaders of
Irish Republican Army (IRA) (9 Aug.).
John Guare scores first true critical
Riot at Attica, a New York prison, ends in Harold Pinter’s Old Times.
notice with House of Blue Leaves when
forty-three deaths, marking increased
staged Off-Broadway.
unrest in U.S.
David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo John Rawls’s Theory of Justice.
Simon Gray’s Butley stars Alan Bates.
Hummel and Sticks and Bones establish
B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and
David Storey’s The Changing Room.
him as major new playwright.
Dignity.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
56
Playwright and anti-war activist Father
Daniel Berrigan is jailed for anti-war
protest “crimes” described in his
dramatization entitled The Trial of the
Catonsville Nine.
South African playwright Athol Fugard is
denied a passport to the U.S. by his
country.
The going rate for best seat at a
Broadway musical is $15.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s dramatic debut,
Happy Birthday, Wanda June.
Musicals include: Follies, Godspell, Two
Gentlemen of Verona.
Steven Tesich’s The Carpenters opens at
Wynn Handman’s American Place
Theater.
Irv Bauer’s A Dream Out of Time.
Sam Shepard’s Back Bog Beast Bait.
Joyce Carol Oates’s Sunday Dinner.
Zindel’s And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little.
George Tabori’s Pinkville.
Ed Bullin’s The Duplex.
A.R. Gurney’s Scenes from an American
Life.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
E. O. Wilson’ s Insect Societies.
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.
Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight.
Deaths of musicians Louis Armstrong
and Jim Morrison.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Punishing students by caning banned in
London schools.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914.
Apollo 13 and 14 launched.
Openings of films include Woody Allen’s
Bananas, William Friedkin’s The French
Connection, Peter Bogdanovich’s The
Last Picture Show, Alan J. Pakula’s Klute,
Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange.
Erich Segal’s novel Love Story.
John Updike’s Rabbit Redux.
Non-U.S. films include: Federico Fellini’s
The Clowns, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The
Conformist, Luchino Visconti’s Death in
Venice, Peter Brook’s King Lear (with
Paul Scofield).
1972
57
Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second
Avenue, Michael Weller’s Moonchildren
(opens Feb. 1972), Rabe’s Sticks and
Bones, and the musical Ain’t Supposed to
Die a Natural Death, win Best Play awards
for 1971–72 season.
Duck Variations, one-act by David Mamet, A plaque is attached to space probe
brings attention to the Chicago
Pioneer 10 to communicate with other
playwright.
possible intelligent life forms beyond
solar system.
Off-Off Broadway links theatre
Equal Rights Amendment specifying
companies through Alliance.
equal rights for women approved by
Congress. Ratified by thirty-five states,
but despite three-year deadline extension
in 1979, it falls three states short of
passage in 1982.
Congress passes Equal Opportunity Act,
allowing for preferential hiring and
promotion of women and minorities.
Hanay Geiogamah founds first all-Indian Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and
repertory company, the American Indian Authenticity.
Theatre Ensemble (later changed to the
Native American Theatre Ensemble).
Pippin the first Broadway show
advertised on television.
The Creation of the World, The Sunshine
Nixon re-elected President.
Boys, Finishing Touches, The River Niger, Five men seized while trying to install
and A Little Night Music win Best Play
eavesdropping equipment in Democratic
awards for 1972–73 season.
National Committee’s Headquarters in
Washington: Watergate break-in
(17 June). Beginning of Watergate
scandal.
TOSOS (The Other Side of the Stage), a
U.S. announces $2,047 million trade
gay producing company, founded by
deficit, first since 1888.
Doric Wilson. It disbands five years later.
Nixon anounces 70,000 U.S. troops will
be withdrawn from Vietnam (13 Jan.).
“Bloody Sunday” in Londonderry,
Northern Ireland. Thirteen civilians
killed during riots against 1971
internment laws (30 Jan.).
Nixon vists Beijing, first visit of U.S.
president (21–28 Feb.) to China. Nixon
arrives in Moscow, first U.S. president to
visit USSR (22 May).
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
The Acting Company forms.
Indiana Repertory Theatre established.
McCarter Theatre Center for the
Performing Arts is founded.
58
Musical Fiddler on the Roof hits record
3,225 performances in single run
(17 June).
Plays of the year include Williams’s
Small Craft Warnings, Miller’s The
Creation of the World and Other Business,
Jason Miller’s That Championship Season
(wins Pulitzer in 1973), Simon’s The
Sunshine Boys, and Shepard’s The Tooth
of Crime.
Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard B. Jacobs
become Chair and President,
respectively, of The Shubert Organization.
The Irish Rebel Theater of New York
City’s Hell’s Kitchen created to reflect
sensibility of “Irish immigrants and bluecollar American Irish.”
Grease, with book, music, and lyrics by
Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, opens at
the Eden Theatre on St. Valentine’s Day,
transfers to Broadway, and plays for
3,388 performances, one of longest runs
in history (later revived in 1994 and still
running in 1997).
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Release of blockbuster film The
Godfather, directed by Francis Ford
Coppola.
Two feminist magazines appear: MS in
the U.S. and Spare Rib in the UK.
Military draft ended; beginning of allvolunteer army.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s collection
Wintering Out.
Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers.
Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.
Managua, Nicaragua, devastated by
earthquake measuring 6.2; about 10,000
perish.
1973
Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line, the
longest running show on Broadway until
1997, opens.
Tennessee Williams’s Out Cry.
Mark Medoff’s When You Comin’ Back,
Red Ryder?
Robert Patrick’s Kennedy’s Children.
The Rhode Island Feminist Theatre
founded.
Lanford Wilson’s The Hot l Baltimore.
Alvin Ailey’s ballet, The Lark Ascending.
59
1974
U.S. population is 210.1 million, increase
of 1.6 million since 1972.
Arab oil embargo (1973–74) creates
gasoline shortages and increases prices.
Long lines and rationing occur at gas
stations in several regions of country.
U.S. Skylab, 120-foot long orbiting work
station, launched into orbit (14 May).
Members of American Indian Movement
(AIM) make grievances known during
seventy-day siege of trading post and
church at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
Watergate trial opens in Washington, D.C.
Supreme Court, in controversial
landmark decision Roe v. Wade, uphold
woman’s right to privacy in opting for
abortion before sixth month of life.
U.S. and South Vietnam sign a ceasefire
with North Vietnam and Viet Cong,
ending Vietnam War.
Jürgen Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis.
Marxist Chilean President Salvador
Allende and 2,700 others are killed by
General Pinochet and a CIA-backed
military junta (11 Sept.).
U.S. and Egypt restore diplomatic
relations (7 Nov.).
Pablo Picasso dies at age ninety-one.
Simon’s The Good Doctor, Miguel Piñero’s
Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy.
Short Eyes (opens 1974), and McNally’s
Peter Shaffer’s Equus.
Bad Habits (also 1974) win Best Play
Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular.
awards for 1973–74 season.
Christopher Hampton’s Savages.
Musicals include A Little Night Music,
Vice-President Spiro Agnew pleads nolo
U.S. skylab, 120-foot long orbiting work
Seesaw, and Raisin.
contendere to charges of income tax
station, launched into earth’s orbit.
evasion, and resigns from office.
Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society.
Hayden White’s Metahistory.
William Friedkin’s box-office smash The
Exorcist is released.
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn deported from
The American Jewish Theatre founded
Neither the Pulitzer Prize for literature,
by Stanley Brechner, to deal with Jewish nor the one for drama, awarded this year. USSR and stripped of citizenship
(13 Feb.).
ideas and culture.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Oakland Ensemble Theatre founded.
Roadside Theater founded in Kentucky.
Syracuse Stage founded.
60
Victory Gardens and Wisdom Bridge
theatres founded in Chicago.
Anthony Hopkins introduced to
Broadway as Dysart in Equus.
Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who
Have Considered Suicide When the
Rainbow is Enuf/is developed at the
Bacchanal, a bar in Berkeley.
Dinner theatre emerges as a new fad in
theatregoing.
The Rocky Horror Show, imported from
England and later a cult film, premieres in
New York.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
American newspaper heiress Patty
Hearst kidnapped by Sybionese
Liberation Army (SLA). In 1976, she is
convicted of collaborating and aiding in
robbery.
Nixon resigns (9 Aug.), succeeded by
Gerald Ford.
Atlanta Braves’ Hank Aaron hits 715th
career homerun, to break Babe Ruth’s
career record (8 April).
President Ford pardons Nixon for
Watergate crimes.
U.S. grants amnesty to those who evaded
draft during Vietnam War years.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Death of Juan Perón (1 July).
Turkey invades Cyprus (20 July).
Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia
deposed in bloodless coup
(12 September).
Britain outlaws the IRA (29 November).
Streaking – running naked at parties,
ceremonies, sporting events, etc. –
enjoys a short-lived fad.
Joseph Beuys’s performance art-piece,
Coyote: I Like America and America Likes
Me, takes place in a New York City.
The Sears Tower in Chicago becomes the Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.
world’s tallest building at 1,454 feet.
Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman
Conquests. Howard Brenton’s The
Churchill Play.
Turkish DC-10 crashes after takeoff near
Paris, France; 346 are killed in worst
crash to date.
1975
The Wooster Group forms, with Spalding
Gray and Willem Dafoe as members. The
troupe is known for their experimental,
often farcical productions.
Pittsburgh Public Theater founded.
The Road Company founded in
Tennessee.
A Chorus Line transfers from OffBroadway to Broadway.
Ed Bullin’s The Taking of Miss Janie has
brief run at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E.
Newhouse Theatre.
U.S. Equal Credit Opportunity Act
prohibits discrimination against women
in granting loans or credit.
The Druid Theatre Company is founded
by Garry Hynes in Galway, Ireland.
Disco becomes current dance craze.
Margaret Thatcher elected leader of
Conservative Party in Britain (11 Feb.).
Viking spacecraft lands on Mars.
Assassination attempt on President Ford
(5 Sept.).
61
Edward Albee wins another Pulitzer for
Seascape.
Work begins on Alaskan oil pipeline,
largest private construction project to
date in U.S.
David Merrick’s production of Williams’s Arthur Ashe becomes first black player
The Red Devil Battery Sign fails miserably. to win men’s singles at Wimbledon
(5 July).
Musicals include: The Wiz, Shenandoah, Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift.
and Chicago (Chita Rivera and Gwen
Verdon).
Murray Schisgal’s All Over Town, Bernard Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws
Slade’s Same Time, Next Year, and
released.
Terrence McNally’s The Ritz win Best
Play awards. The latter one of the first
Broadway comedies with a gay milieu.
U.S. scientists warn of danger of
chlorofluorocarbons.
U.S. increases airlift of arms and
ammunition to Phnom Penh (12 Feb.),
but Cambodian government surrenders
to Khmer Rouge on 17 April. The Khmer
Rouge forcibly removes entire city to
countryside, where estimated 1 million
to 3 million die.
Turkish Cypriots proclaim northern part
of Cyprus a separate state (13 Feb.).
South Vietnam surrenders to North
Vietnamese Communists (30 April).
Six men, known as the “Birmingham Six,”
are sentenced to life imprisonment after
being convicted of planting bombs that
killed twenty-one people in Britain
(15 Aug.). They are acquitted and
released in 1989.
Seamus Heaney’s North.
Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s
Horseman.
Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land.
Vaclav Havel’s Audience.
Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa
disappears and is presumed murdered.
1976
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
62
South American writer Carlos Fuentes’s
Terra Nostra.
A rebellion by Kurds in northern Iraq is
crushed.
The Roadside Theater (Kentucky) begins Outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease occurs Deaths of Chinese Prime Minister Zhou
touring Appalachian working-class
at Philadelphia convention of American
Enlai and Mao Zedong.
communities.
Legion.
The Iron Clad Agreement founded in
Jimmy Carter succeeds Ford as
Civil war between Muslim and Christian
forces intensifies in Lebanon
Pittsburgh by Julia Swoyer and Wilson
President.
(13–19 May).
Hutton to bring plays about labor and
industrial history to working-class
audiences.
San Diego Repertory Theatre founded.
Nobel Prize for Literature won by Saul
Mystery writer Agatha Christie dies at
Bellow.
age eighty-five.
Steppenwolf Theatre Company forms in
Blockbusters Rocky, One Flew Over the
Race riots in Soweto, South Africa, in
Chicago.
Cuckoo’s Nest, and All the President’s Men protest against legislation to force use of
released.
Afrikaans in some teaching. By June 25,
176 are dead and over 1,000 injured
(16 June).
Julia Heyward’s Shake! Daddy! Shake!
Alex Haley’s Roots, an ancestral novel
Idi Amin of Uganda is made President for
performance piece.
dealing with U.S. history and the black
life (25 June).
experience.
A Chorus Line, by Michael Bennett, James Bicentennial celebrated; American
25,000 Protestants and Catholics take
Kirkwood, Nicholas Dante, Marvin
population at 215 million.
part in peace march in Londonderry,
Hamlisch, and Edward Kleban, garners
Northern Ireland (4 Sept.).
Pulitzer.
Sam Shepard’s The Curse of the Starving
Argentine writer Manuel Puig’s The Kiss
Class.
of the Spider Woman.
Julie Harris wins unprecedented fifth
“Punk” music and style emerges on
Tony for solo performance in The Belle
streets of London.
of Amherst.
1977
63
Jules Feiffer’s Knock Knock, Milan Stitt’s
The Runner Stumbles, and the Stephen
Sondheim/John Weidman musical Pacific
Overtures designated Best Plays.
Other plays and musicals of the year
include: Simon’s California Suite, Preston
Jones’s A Texas Trilogy, Mamet’s A Life in
the Theater, Shepard’s Angel City,
Bubblin’ Brown Sugar.
Two former members of San Francisco
Mime Troupe, Denny Patridge and Steve
Friedman, found Modern Times Theater
at School for Marxist Education.
Second widespread gasoline shortage
in U.S.
The Dakota Theater Caravan founded in Gary Gilmore asks for and receives death
South Dakota to deal with regionalist
penalty, the first person executed in the
histories and themes.
U.S. in ten years.
Pan Asian Repertory Theatre founded.
The King of rock’n’roll Elvis Presley
dies at age forty-two (16 Aug.).
Plays of the year include: Mamet’s The
Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon.
Water Engine, Miller’s The Archbishop’s
Ceiling, Marsha Norman’s Getting Out,
Simon’s Chapter Two, Wendy
Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and
Others, Williams’s Vieux Carré, Albert
Innaurato’s Gemini, D. L. Coburn’s The
Gin Game (with Hume Cronyn and
Jessica Tandy; directed by Mike Nichols),
Ronald Ribman’s Cold Storage.
Beatlemania, an odd mixture of
Soundtrack album for Saturday Night
Broadway musical, social documentary, Fever becomes worldwide bestseller.
and rock concert, opens.
Dracula, with Frank Langella as the
Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall sets off
Count, comes to the Broadway stage for fashion craze.
925 performances.
Australia’s Perth Entertainment Centre
built with seating capacity of 8,003,
making it world’s largest theatre in
regular operation.
Violent student riots in Italy (14 March).
President Mgoubi of the Congo shot and
killed (18 March).
Leonid Brezhnev named USSR President
and Communist Party leader (16 June).
“Gang of Four” expelled from Chinese
Communist Party (22 July).
Charlie Chaplin dies at Swiss estate at
age eighty-eight.
Civilian government in Thailand ousted
in bloodless coup (20 Oct.).
Tom Stoppard’s play Every Good Boy
Deserves Favour.
DATES
1978
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
David Mamet’s American Buffalo
introduces the playwright to Broadway.
Annie by Charles Strouse, Martin
Charnin, and Thomas Meehan the
musical hit of the year.
Susan Eisenberg founds Word of Mouth
Productions, an all-women political
theatre collective established to reach
working-class women audiences.
The Crossroads Theatre, an African
American theatre, founded in New
Brunswick, New Jersey.
64
Theatre de la Jeune Lune founded in
Minneapolis.
Women’s Project and Productions
founded in New York.
Plays of year include: Lanford Wilson’s
Fifth of July, Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, Sam
Shepard’s Buried Child, Curse of the
Starving Class (written 1976) and Seduced,
Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (Los Angeles),
Arthur Kopit’s Wings (Yale Rep), and
Christopher Durang’s A History of the
American Film (written in 1976).
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
George Lucas’s Star Wars a blockbuster
hit.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Djibouti, last European colony in Africa,
granted independence.
The punk group Sex Pistols hit headlines
for their foul language and bad behavior,
and are banned from the BBC.
Supreme Court issues Bakke decision, in Pope Paul VI dies (6 Aug.), is succeeded
which it is ruled that a white medical
by John Paul I, who dies suddenly. On 16
student applicant was illegally
October, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of
Poland becomes first non-Italian Pope
discriminated against, and principle of
affirmative action upheld.
since 1523.
Polish émigré Czeslaw Milosz’s Bells in
President Jimmy Carter hosts talks
Winter.
between Egypt and Israel, resulting in
the Camp David Accords, which fix
schedule for peace negotiations
(5–17 Sept.).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn completes The
911 members from the People’s Temple
Gulag Archipelago.
in San Francisco commit suicide at
Jonestown, Guyana, with their leader,
Rev. Jim Jones (18 Nov.).
Isaac Bashevis Singer wins Nobel Prize
Egyptian Premier Anwar Sadat and
for Literature.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin
share Nobel Peace Prize.
Philip Guston’s painting, The Ladder.
Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea wins
Booker Prize.
The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro, U.S. agrees to return full control of
wins five Oscars.
Panama Canal to Panama in 1999.
Musicals: On the 20th Century, Ain’t
Misbehavin’, The Best Little Whorehouse
in Texas, Evita, Ballroom.
1979
65
The Harold Clurman Theater established
in New York City.
The Everyday Theater of Washington, D.C.
founded to play to working-class tenants.
The nine members are directly involved
in struggles as activists in tenants’
rights movement.
The American Repertory Theatre
founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Iranian revolution opposing
governmental reforms Westernizing the
country begins.
Irish playwright Hugh Leonard’s Da.
Test-tube fertilization success with birth
of Louise Brown in England.
David Hare’s Plenty.
Pinter’s Betrayal.
Stoppard’s Night and Day.
Three Mile Island nuclear plant near
Middleton, Penn., damaged. A state of
emergency declared pending
investigation.
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty
(SALT II) between U.S. and USSR sets
maximum number of long-range missiles
and bombers for each nation.
In U.S. v. Weber, U.S. Supreme Court
ruling supports affirmative action.
Diplomatic relations established
between China and U.S. for the first time
since creation of People’s Republic
(1 Jan.).
Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran after
fifteen-year exile (15 Feb.).
President Sadat and Prime Minister
Begin sign peace treaty, ending thirtyone years of war (26 March).
Margaret Thatcher becomes first female
prime minister in Europe, after UK
general election (3 May).
Perseverance Theatre formed in Alaska.
Ex-Sex Pistol Sid Vicious dies of a drug
overdose.
New York Second Stage and Theatre for a Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis
New Audience founded in New York.
Ford Coppola, released.
Plays of the year include: Ernest
Thompson’s On Golden Pond, Michael
Weller’s Loose End, Vernel Bagners’s One
Mo’ Time, Bernard Slade’s Romantic
Comedy, Christopher Durang’s Sister
Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, Beth
Henley’s Crimes of the Heart (Actors
Theatre of Louisville).
Virginia State Company formed.
American Airlines plane crashes at
Chicago’s O’Hare Airport; 275 die in
worst U.S. air crash to date.
Sony Walkman introduced.
Earl Mountbatten of Burma, last British
Viceroy of India, killed by IRA bomb
(27 Aug.).
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Sam Shepard wins Pulitzer for Buried
Child.
Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Mother
Teresa.
The Gay Men’s Press founded in London.
Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.
Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, The
Demon Barber of Fleet Street with Angela
Lansbury and Len Cariou premieres.
First Monday in October, Wings, On
Golden Pond, and Sweeney Todd
designated Best Plays for 1978–79.
66
1980
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Workers’ Stage of New York City founded. Race riots in Miami after all-white jury
acquits four white policemen charged
with fatal beating of black man
(17–19 May).
The Denver Center Theatre Company
Sioux Indian nation wins $122.5 million in
founded.
compensation and interest for federal
government’s illegal seizure of their
Black Hill land in 1877 (30 June).
The Portland Repertory Theater founded.
Ronald Reagan elected President.
In war in El Salvador, government fights
leftist rebels and rightist death squads.
Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine.
American-born English playwright
Bernard Pomerance writes The Elephant
Man.
American writer Martin Sherman’s Bent
premieres at London’s Royal Court.
Dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov
stripped of honors and exiled from
Moscow (22 Jan.).
Catholic archbishop Oscar Romero shot
dead, while celebrating mass in San
Salvador (24 March).
President Carter breaks all diplomatic
relations with Iran and announces a ban
on trade with Iran because of continued
detention of U.S. hostages. U.S.
negotiates through other countries for
Americans held hostage by Iranians in
Tehran (7 April).
Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly with Judd
Hirsch wins Pulitzer.
67
Plays of the year include: Albee’s The
Lady from Dubuque, William
Mastrosimone’s The Woodgatherers,
Miller’s The American Clock, Shepard’s
True West, Mark Medoff’s Children of a
Lesser God (Tony award for deaf actress
Phyllis Frelich), Samm-Art Williams’s
Home, Wilson’s The Fifth of July (on
Broadway).
Philip Glass’s opera, Satyagraha.
Musicals of the season: Barnum, Sugar
Babies, and 42nd Street, the latter
opening hours after director Gower
Champion dies.
Peter Hall’s production of Shaffer’s
Amadeus stars Ian McKellen and Tim
Curry on Broadway.
Former Beatle John Lennon is shot and
killed outside his New York City hotel by
jealous fan (8 Dec.).
Severe summer drought and heatwave
roasts U.S. Midwest, Southwest, and
South. Over 1,200 perish and livestock
and crops are heavily damaged.
Death of Jean-Paul Sartre, aged
seventy-four (15 April).
Death of Josip Broz Tito, ruler of
Yugoslavia for thirty-five years, at age
eighty-seven (4 May).
Death of actor Peter Sellers at age fiftyfour (24 July).
Vietnam invades Thailand by way of
Cambodia (23 June).
Russian émigré poet Joseph Brodsky’s A
Part of Speech.
Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to
Polish émigré Czeslaw Milosz.
Jack Beal’s painting The Harvest.
Olympic Games held in Moscow, but
boycotted by over forty-five nations, for
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
(19 July–3 Aug.).
Lech Walesa forms unprecedented
independent trade union in Poland,
Solidarnosc (31 Aug.).
Mount St. Helens erupts, kills eight and
sends up 60,000-foot plume of ash.
War breaks out in Persian Gulf as Iraq
invades Iran (22 Sept.).
Louis Malle film Atlantic City with script
by John Guare.
David Lynch’s The Elephant Man with
Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt.
Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain.
Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings.
Pam Gems’s Piaf.
David Edgar’s adaptation of Nicholas
Nickleby, produced by RSC.
Willy Russell’s Educating Rita.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
1981
Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music and
the New York Shakespeare Festival
production of The Pirates of Penzance
garner special citations of New York
Drama Critics Award.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
President Reagan and three aides shot in U.S.–Iran agreement frees fifty-two
assassination attempt (30 March).
hostages held in Teheran since
November, 1979.
Sandra Day O’Connor becomes first
woman member of Supreme Court.
68
Bobby Sands is first of ten IRA hunger
strikers to die in Maze Prison in Belfast.
Riots erupt in Northern Ireland after his
death (5 May).
Plays include: Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Exclusion of women from draft upheld by Death of Jamaican reggae singer/activist
Heart, Kevin Wade’s Key Exchange,
U.S. Supreme Court. It is considered a
Bob Marley, aged thirty-six (11 May).
Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy,
setback by women’s movement.
Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, Bill C.
Davis’s Mass Appeal.
Frank Rich replaces Walter Kerr as
drama critic for the New York Times.
Music Television (MTV) premieres on
Wedding of Prince Charles of Britain and
Cable Network, featuring video
Lady Diana Spencer of Britain (29 July).
renditions of pop music.
Musicals: Sophisticated Ladies, Woman
John Updike’s novel Rabbit Is Rich, the
of the Year, Dreamgirls. March of the
third in a series of four.
Falsettos introduces work of William Finn. Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.
Tennessee Williams’s final New York
President Reagan orders firing of some
Researchers identify acquired immunoproduction, Something Cloudy, Something 12,000 federal air-traffic controllers after deficiency syndrome (AIDS), whose
Clear fails.
they refuse to end illegal strike.
symptoms first appeared in late 1970s.
Nickolas Nickleby imported to Broadway.
President Anwar Sadat of Egypt
This eight-hour marathon is first
assassinated by Muslim extremists
collaboration between Shubert and
(6 Oct.).
Nederlander organizations.
Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms.
Beckett’s Catastrophe and Rockaby.
Edward Bond’s Restoration.
1982
The Gay Meridian Theatre founded by
Terry Miller and Terry Helling.
69
Jarvik 7 artificial heart implanted.
Recipient Barney Clark survives 112
days.
The Huntington Theatre Company of
USA Today, first national newspaper,
Boston, Massachusetts, founded.
launched by Gannet.
Plays of the year include: A.R. Gurney’s
Michael Jackson releases Thriller (LP),
The Dining Room, John Pielmeier’s Agnes which outsells all previous solo records.
of God, “Master Harold”. . . And the Boys
Sales for record reach $40 million by
(Fugard’s Broadway debut), revival of
1988.
Shepard’s True West (with John
Malkovich and Gary Sinese in New York
debuts), William Mastrosimone’s
Extremities.
Musicals include: Forbidden Broadway,
“Rap” music becomes popular in the
Nine, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats
U.S. and UK.
(7 Oct.), the latter produced by Cameron
Mackintosh and the symbolic start of
the “British invasion” of musicals.
Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy
Worldwide glut in oil supply leads to
transfers 10 June to the Little Theatre on declining gasoline and home-heating oil
Broadway and lasts 1,222 performances. prices in U.S.
Howard Ashman’s and Alan Menken’s
The Little Shop of Horrors opens at the
Orpheum Theatre, Off-Broadway.
1983
The Cleveland Public Theatre founded.
Hungarian architect Erno Rubik
introduces Rubik’s Cube, with 42.3
quintillion possible configurations.
Poet Derek Walcott’s collection The
Unfortunate Traveller.
Argentinian forces invade Falkland
Islands (2 April).
President-elect of Lebanon, Bashir
Gemayel, killed in bomb explosion in
Beirut (14 Sept.).
Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev dies of
heart attack at seventy-five (10 Nov.).
Australian novelist Thomas Keneally
writes Schindler’s Ark, of which a movie
version in 1994 becomes a blockbuster.
Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill.
Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a
Death Foretold. Márquez wins Nobel
Prize for Literature.
Compact disc (CD) technology
Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls.
introduced in U.S.
David Hare’s A Map of the World.
Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.
C.P. Taylor’s Good (posthumous).
Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing.
U.S. and Caribbean allies invade
President Reagan announces beginning
of Strategic Defense Initiative (23 March). Granada.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother wins
Pulitzer.
Other new plays include: Tina Howe’s
Painting Churches, Simon’s Brighton
Beach Memoirs, Mamet’s Glengarry Glen
Ross (premieres in London), and
Shepard’s Fool for Love.
Tennessee Williams dies in New York
City.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
70
Sally Ride, first female astronaut,
launched into orbit (18–24 June).
NutraSweet introduced as synthetic
sugar substitute.
Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie
imprisoned in Lyons (5 Feb.).
U.S. embassy in Beirut bombed, killing
more than thirty (18 April).
Yuri Andropov elected President of
Soviet Presidium (16 June).
Musicals: My One and Only, La Cage
Aux Folles, Baby, and The Tap.
Australia II becomes first boat to take
Americas Cup from New York Yacht Club
(26 Sept.).
Nearly 100 million watch TV film The Day
After about nuclear holocaust (28 Nov.).
British director Peter Brook brings La
Tragédie de Carmen to Lincoln Center.
Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple
wins Pulitzer.
Brad Davis’s painting Evening Shore.
1984
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross wins
Pulitzer and New York Drama Critics’
Circle Award for best American play.
Samuel Beckett receives special citation
from New York Drama Critics’ Circle for
life achievement.
James Lapine directs Sondheim’s Sunday
in the Park with George, which wins
Pulitzer.
Martin Luther King Day becomes U.S.
national holiday.
Subway passenger Bernhard Goetz
shoots and wounds four black youths
after they allegedly try to mug him
(24 Jan.).
New rating category, PG-13, adopted by
film industry.
70mm and Dolby sound introduced.
Baboon heart implanted into human
baby.
Rebels from Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority
kill thirteen government soldiers,
sparking off ethnic riots (23 July).
Thirty-eight prisoners, members of IRA,
escape in massive breakout of Maze
Prison in Northern Ireland (25 July).
Soviet fighter plane shoots down South
Korean airliner, off course in Soviet
airspace; 269 are killed.
Caryl Churchill’s Fen.
Hugh Williams’s Pack of Lies.
George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, a
novel expressing a grim future of
totalitarianism, is thirty-six years old.
Mine workers stage coal strike in over
100 pits in UK (12 March).
Hundreds die when Indian troops storm
the holiest Sikh shrine, the Golden
Temple of Amritsar (5–7 June).
Gunman opens fire in McDonald’s
hamburger restaurant in San Diego,
California, killing twenty-one (18 July).
In South Africa, fourteen are killed at
Sharpeville and black townships near
Johannesburg (3 Sept.).
Geraldine Ferraro first woman on major
party ticket to run for vice president.
William Hoffman’s As Is, the first AIDS
play on commercial stage, opens
(10 March).
U.S. becomes net debtor nation for first
time since early 1900s, as result of
continuing trade deficits.
Sagging ticket sales and higher costs of
production in New York City’s theatre
district lead to cutbacks of shows
staged. 1985 has lowest number of
plays staged since 1900.
Coca-Cola introduces new formula Coke.
Public outcry results in return to old
formula a year later.
IRA launch bomb attack at Grand Hotel
in Brighton where most of British
cabinet is staying (12 Oct.).
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
assassinated (Oct. 31).
Nobel Peace Prize awarded to South
African bishop Desmond Tutu.
Toxic leakage at U.S.-owned Union
Carbide in Bhopal, India causes 2,500
deaths (Dec.).
Sarah Kirsch’s play Katzenleben.
Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of
Disapproval.
Michael Frayn’s Benefactors.
Czech writer Milan Kundera publishes
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Soviet premier Chernenko dies; Mikhail
Gorbachev succeeds him as General
Secretary of the Communist Party
(10 March).
New round of nuclear limitation talks in
Geneva between U.S. and USSR.
Gorbachev announces policy of
perestroika (June).
Palestinian guerillas hijack Italian liner
and murder U.S. hostage (7 Oct.).
71
Plays of the season include: Beth
Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest,
David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, Lanford Wilson’s
Balm in Gilead, and Larry Shue’s The
Foreigner.
August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom is his first play seen on
Broadway.
1985
Bookstores in U.S. and Canada number
23,749.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
League of New York Theatres and
Producers changes name to League of
American Theatres and Producers to
reflect nationwide scope of industry.
Yul Brynner, who dies this year, gives
4,625th and last performance in The
King and I.
72
1986
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
President Reagan sworn in for second
term in office (20 Jan.).
Actor Rock Hudson dies of AIDS at age
fifty-nine.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Vaclav Havel’s play Temptation.
Irish dramatist Tom Murphy’s
Bailegangaire.
Peter Barnes’s Red Noses.
Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the
Time of Cholera.
Anita Brookner wins Booker Prize for
Hotel Du Luc.
Columbian leftist terrorist group M-19
seizes Palace of Justice and executes 100
people.
Drug trade increases sharply in
Columbia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
Almost 700 terrorist attacks worldwide.
Plays of year include: Simon’s Biloxi
Blues, Herb Gardner’s I’m Not Rappaport,
Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind, Christopher
Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo
(revised), Larry Kramer’s The Normal
Heart, and Lyle Kessler’s Orphans.
Amy Clampitt’s novel What the Light Was
Like.
Alison Lurie wins Pulitzer for Foreign
Affairs.
Musicals: Big River and The Mystery of
Edwin Drood.
Retired naval officer Arthur James
Claude-Michel Schonberg’s, Alain
Walker is convicted by a federal judge of Boubil’s, and Herbert Kretzmer’s musical
participating in a Soviet spy ring (1 July). Les Misérables opens in London. It will
play around the world to well over 35
million people.
Marathon rock concert in Philadelphia,
Live Aid, raises $70 million for starving
Africans.
Space Shuttle Challenger explodes after
President Jean-Claude Duvalier flees
launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida, killing Haiti (7 Feb.).
all seven on board (28 Jan.).
President Marcos flees the Philippines
(26 Feb.) after twenty years with U.S.
assistance, as Corazon Aquino is elected
President.
1985–86 is a financially and critically
disastrous New York season. Slim
offerings include A. R. Gurney’s The
Perfect Party, Simon’s Broadway Bound,
Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, Tina
Howe’s Coastal Disturbances.
Lincoln Center Theatre Company
launched with revival of The Front Page.
London import Me and My Girl opens
Marquis Theatre in Marriott Marquis
Hotel, the prior site of the Helen Hayes
and Morosco theatres.
73
1987
Two scientific teams report finding AIDS
viruses. U.S. officials predict AIDS cases
will increase tenfold over next five years.
President Ronald Reagan denies
exchanging hostages and halts arms
sales (19 Nov.); diversion of funds from
arms sales to Nicaraguan contras
revealed (25 Nov.).
U.S. Supreme Court upholds affirmative
action hiring quotas, which promote
hiring of women and minorities as
remedy for past discrimination.
Paul Simon releases Graceland album,
with black South African musicians
performing on it.
Author Paul Auster’s The New York
Trilogy.
First wave of baby-boomers born after
World War II turn forty.
August Wilson’s Fences, starring James
Earl Jones, wins Pulitzer and New
York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for
Best Play, regardless of category.
The FDA approves of the experimental
drug AZT for treatment of AIDS sufferers
(20 March).
Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Les
Misérables (opens 12 March at Broadway
Theatre) win New York Drama Critics’
Circle Awards for best foreign play and
best musical, respectively.
Tom Wolfe’s bestselling tale of corporate
greed, The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past is revealed
(3 March).
U.S. aircraft attack targets in Libya after
alleged Libyan attacks on U.S. aircraft
participating in exercises in Gulf of Sirtre
(24 March).
Desmond Tutu is elected head of the
Anglican Church, South Africa (14 April).
Chernobyl nuclear plant explodes in
Ukraine, near Kiev (26 April).
Jonathan Jay Pollard is found guilty of
being a spy for Israel (4 June).
Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to
Nigerian poet and playwright Wole
Soyinka.
Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Phantom
of the Opera, directed by Hal Prince,
premieres at London’s Her Majesty’s
Theatre.
Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF)
provides for dismantling of all Soviet
and U.S. intermediate-range nuclear
weapons.
U.S. and Soviet Union work toward
coordinating future Mars missions and
exchanging space data.
Christie’s auction rooms in London sells
Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for $39.9 million
(30 March).
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Plays of the year include: Alfred Uhry’s
Driving Miss Daisy (wins 1988 Pulitzer),
Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, Robert
Harling’s Steel Magnolias, McNally’s
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.
Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s musical
Into the Woods opens at the Martin Beck.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
The Crash of 1987, in which stock prices
plummet 508 points, occurs (19 Oct.).
Klaus Barbie, Gestapo wartime chief in
Lyons, is sentenced to life imprisonment
(4 July).
Elementary and secondary school
teachers in U.S. earn annual salary of
$26,700.
Joseph Brodsky wins the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
UN implements resolution calling on Iran
and Iraq to agree on ceasefire (20 July).
Robert Bork is rejected as Supreme
Court Justice (23 Oct.).
40% of American households own a VCR.
74
1988
The Phantom of the Opera, with music by
Andrew Lloyd Webber and starring
Michael Crawford, opens on Broadway
(26 Jan.) with biggest advance to date.
Still running in 1999.
Premiere of Philip Glass’s opera The
Making of the Representative for Planet 8.
U.S. produces 13 million cars and trucks
this year.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor
wins nine Oscars.
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.
Peace accord signed with India to stop
bloodshed in Sri Lanka, between Tamils
and Sinhalese (29 July).
Nazi Rudolph Hess commits suicide in
Spandau Prison, Berlin (17 Aug.).
South African musical Serafina!
premieres at Johannesburg’s Market
Theatre.
Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage a
major hit in London for Maggie Smith.
Intifada in Israel begins.
Worldwide stock exchange crash on 19
Oct.
USSR premier Gorbachev announces
Soviet troops will begin withdrawal from
Afghanistan (8 Feb.).
Three IRA soldiers shot dead by British
SAS forces in Gibraltar under
controversial “shoot to kill” policy
(6 March).
U.S. warship Vicennes shoots down
Iranian civilian airliner, killing all 290
aboard (3 July).
Robots are used for fruit-picking in U.S.
experiments.
25 million left homeless in Bangladesh
due to widespread flooding (31 July).
50,000 killed in earthquake in Armenia
(7 July).
Sculptor Louise Nevelson dies at age
eighty-eight.
Number and quality of productions on
Broadway reach all-time low during first
six months of year, followed by a spurt
of activity between September and end
of year.
George Bush elected President.
Pan Am Boeing 747 crashes at Lockerbie,
Scotland, killing all 259 aboard (21 Dec.).
Investigations reveal crash was due to
terrorist bomb.
Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses sparks
religious controversy; Ayatollah
Khomeini calls for the author’s death on
14 February 1989.
Italian semiotician and fiction writer
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.
U.S. sends troops to Honduras following
border incursion by Nicarauguan troops.
Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is
longest running play to date. First
performed in 1952, it tops 14,500
performances in 1988.
American-born playwright Timberlake
Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good
(based on Thomas Keneally’s The
Playmaker) opens at London’s Royal
Court.
Estonian and Lithuanian legislatures
pass laws making Estonian and
Lithuanian official languages of republics
(Jan.).
75
Plays include: A. R. Gurney’s The Cocktail
Hour and Love Letters, David Henry
Hwang’s M. Butterfly (commissioned
specifically for Broadway), Wendy
Wasserstein’s Heidi Chronicles (wins 1989
Pulitzer), David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow,
Simon’s Rumors, August Wilson’s Joe
Turner’s Come and Gone (1984 premiere
at Yale Rep).
New York Landmarks Preservation
Commission designates most Broadway
theatres as historic sites.
1989
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
In controversial move, National
Endowment for Arts refuses to fund
performance artists Holly Hughes,
John Fleck, Karen Finley, and Tim Miller.
Plays include: Aaron Sorkin’s A Few
Good Men, Fugard’s My Children, My
Africa, and McNally’s Lisbon Traviata.
76
Jerome Robbins’ Broadway wins Tony for
best musical, suggesting the low ebb of
the Broadway musical. Only original
musicals of note are Grand Hotel and
City of Angels, though revival of Gypsy
is successful (as are Anything Goes at
Lincoln Center and Sweeney Todd at
Circle in the Square).
Vanessa Redgrave appears in revival of
Orpheus Descending; Dustin Hoffman
essays Shylock (both directed by Peter
Hall).
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
An upturned tanker Exxon Valdez sends
11 million gallons of crude oil into
Alaska’s Prince William Sound
(24 March).
The Corcoran Art Gallery cancels
exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s
homoerotic photographs (12 June);
Senator Jesse Helms introduces
legislation that would ban National
Endowment of the Arts from funding
“obscene works.”
Colin Powell is first African American to
be named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff (9 Aug.).
Death of Hirohito, Emperor of Japan
since 1926 (7 Jan.).
New studies comparing math abilities of
students in six countries show U.S.
students last and South Korean students
first.
U.S. space probe Magellan launched
from earth orbiting shuttle, Atlantis. It
will reach Venus fifteen months later. U.S.
launches space probe Galileo, which
will rendezvous with Jupiter in 1995.
Death of Ayatollah Khomeini (3 June).
The first democratic Soviet elections
(26 March).
3,000 students demanding greater
democratic freedom begin hunger strike
in Tiananmen Square in Beijing (13 May).
Government imposes martial law on May
20. The student rising is crushed on 4
June.
Legal status of abortion challenged by
Mikhail Gorbachev elected President of
ProLife groups, following reinterpretation USSR (25 May).
of Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court in
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services
upholds Missouri law banning abortion
by public employees unless life of mother
is in danger.
P. W. Botha resigns as President of South
Africa (14 Aug.). F.W. de Klerk assumes
acting presidency.
Serial killer Theodore “Ted” Bundy
executed in Florida for 1978 murder of
twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. He is
convicted of two others, and confesses
to sixteen more.
First flight of the stealth bomber.
Hurricane Hugo devastates east coast,
causing extensive property damage and
virtually leveling Charlestown, South
Carolina.
Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.
Peter Halley’s painting Red Cell.
France celebrates bicentennial of
Revolution (13 July).
Deng Xiaoping resigns from China’s
leadership (9 Nov.).
The Berlin Wall comes down (10 Nov.).
U.S. begins military assault on Panama
to capture General Manuel Noriega
(20 Dec.).
77
Japanese-born writer Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day.
Bruce Beresford’s film Driving Miss Daisy Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan’s
wins four Oscars and Academy Award for adaptation of Christy Brown’s life story,
Best Picture.
My Left Foot.
USX workers end longest strike in U.S.
The Dalai Lama of Tibet wins Nobel
history (1 Aug. 1988–2 Feb. 1989).
Peace Prize.
American steel companies report
earnings of some $2 billion, marking
strongest recovery from 1982–86 lows.
Junk Bond King Michael Milken is
Miss Saigon by Alain Boubil, Claudeindicted on securities laws violations.
Michel Schonberg, and Richard Maltby,
He pleads guilty and agrees to pay
Jr. opens with Jonathan Pryce at
record $600 million in penalties.
London’s Drury Lane.
Stock market plunges 190 points,
second largest drop in one day in history
of NYSE.
Activist Abbie Hoffman dies.
Willem De Kooning’s Interchange sells for
$20.7 million.
DATES
1990
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
A Chorus Line closes in April to capacity
crowd of 1,500 at New York’s Shubert
Theatre; record of 6,137 performances.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
During 1990s Germany and Japan join
U.S. as leading economic forces, while
many U.S. companies start or strengthen
operations abroad.
Actor Rex Harrison dies at age eighty-two.
Film actress Irene Dunne dies at age
ninety-one.
Actress and singer Pearl Bailey dies at
The Hubble Space Telescope deployed in
age seventy-two.
Earth orbit.
Composers Leonard Bernstein, Aaron
Copland, and Doc Pomus all pass away.
78
Broadway Alliance created to stimulate
production and develop new audiences.
Plays of year include Craig Lucas’s
Prelude to a Kiss, about AIDS.
August Wilson receives second Pulitzer
for The Piano Lesson (premiered at Yale
Rep in 1988).
Chicago continues to be a major hub of
America’s theatrical activity.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Cuba joins UN Security Council after
thirty-year break (1 Jan.).
Protesters riot in Soviet Republic of
Azerbaijan (3 Jan.).
General Manuel Noriega surrenders in
Panama (3 Jan.).
President F.W. De Klerk lifts thirty-year
ban on ANC and South African
Communist Party (2 Feb.).
Nelson Mandela released from Victor
Verster prison near Cape Town (11 Feb.).
First genuine multiparty elections since
1917 held in USSR (24 Feb.).
Augusto Pinochet, President of Chile,
hands power over to Patricio Aylwin,
ending dictatorship (11 March).
Violent protests across Britain and
Wales as councils set poll tax rates
(March).
Iraq invades Kuwait (2 Aug.).
The Republic of Armenia declares
independence from USSR (23 Aug.).
Cold War officially ends, with signing of
Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in
Europe (19 Nov.).
Thatcher announces she will not fight
for Tory party leadership; John Major
becomes Prime Minister of Britain
(22 Nov.).
1991
79
A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession wins
Booker Prize.
Landmark agreement between Soviet
President Gorbachev and West German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in which
Gorbachev drops opposition to
membership of united Germany in
NATO.
Soviet troops based in Czechoslovakia
since 1968 begin phased withdrawal to
be completed by 1 July 1991.
British plays: David Hare’s Racing
Demons, Ayckbourn’s Man of the
Moment. Irish play: Brian Friel’s Dancing
at Lughnasa.
John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation
During the controversial Supreme Court War (Operation Desert Storm) breaks
(opened 1990) wins New York Drama
hearings of nominee Clarence Thomas
out in Persian Gulf (16 Jan.).
Critics’ Circle Award for Best American
alleged sexual harassment involving aide President Bush announces allies have
Play; English actress Eileen Atkins
Anita Hill emerges (Oct.).
won war to liberate Kuwait
receives special citation for her portrayal
(28 Feb.).
of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.
Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon wins Tony First digital high-definition television
Warfare breaks out in Slovenia as
Award and Putlitzer, Simon’s first.
developed.
Yugoslav tanks arrive to curb rebellion
Other plays include McNally’s Teeth
(27 June).
Together, Lips Apart and Jon Robin
Tensions grow between Serbs and
Baitz’s The Substance of Fire.
Croats in Croatia (9 July).
Robert Lewis, Pearl Bailey, Leland
Gorbachev resigns as head of
Hayward, Tony Walton, Paddy Chayefsky,
Communist Party (25 Aug.). Boris Yeltsin
Earl Blackwell, Tommy Tune, Chita
takes over.
Communism ends in Eastern Europe
Rivera, John Kander, and Fred Ebb are
and, later, Soviet Union. Cold War ends.
elected to Theater Hall of Fame by
American Theater Critics Association.
Writer Graham Greene dies, aged
Edward Albee wins tenth annual William
eighty-six.
Inge Award for lifetime achievement in
Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to
American theatre.
South African writer Nadine Gordimer.
DATES
80
1992
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Ulysses Dove, Eiko and Koma, Karen
Finley, Margarita Guergue and Hahn
Rowe, Robbie McCauley, Mark Morris,
and Wim Vandekeybus win the
choreographer/creator award for
seventh annual New York Dance and
Performance (Bessie) Awards.
Jonathan Pryce and Lea Salonga, stars of
Miss Saigon, win Tony Awards for best
acting in musical. Biggest box office
advance in theatrical history.
Broadway musical The Secret Garden
boasts of its predominately female
creative team.
Lillian Hellman dies, aged eighty-three.
Joseph Papp dies (b. 1921), leaving the
New York Shakespeare Festival in
disarray.
After much promise, the musical Nick
and Nora closes after nine performances.
The Will Rogers Follies opens at the
newly renovated Palace, with book by
Peter Stone, music by Cy Coleman, and
lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph
Green; wins six Tony Awards.
Broadway Cares and Broadway Fights
AIDS introduce the red “AIDS ribbon” at
Tony Awards.
David Mamet and Patricia Wolff found
Boston’s Back Bay Theater Company,
though other than premiering Oleanna it
fails to develop.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
German-Swiss playwright Max
Frisch dies.
Riots in Los Angeles after four white
police officers acquitted on assault
charges on black motorist, Rodney King
(29 April). Fifty-eight people killed in
next six days of unrest.
President Bush and President Yeltsin
sign statement of general principles to
bring East–West rivalry and the Cold
War to an end (1 Feb.).
California struck by two severe
The Pope admits the Catholic Church
earthquakes which injure 170 and
was wrong in condemning Galileo
kill two (28 June).
(31 Oct.).
Thirty-five people killed when Hurricane
Andrew sweeps across southern Florida
and Louisiana (25–26 Aug.). It is the most
expensive natural disaster in U.S. history,
with thousands left homeless and
damage in Florida alone in excess of
$20 million.
Tony for Best Play goes to Irish
playwright Brian Friel’s Dancing at
Lughnasa.
The Catholic Church issues new
catechism, voicing disdain for
drunkenness, embezzlement, and
speeding (16 Nov.).
Biggest musical hit on Broadway is a
revival of Guys and Dolls directed by
Jerry Zaks.
Clown Lou Jacobs dies at age eighty-nine.
Pioneer choreographer Hanya Holm dies.
Mamet’s Oleanna creates controversy
Off-Broadway and later around the
country.
Tony Randall establishes National Actors
Theatre (actually debuts with The
Crucible, December 1991) but fails to
produce any notable stagings (as will be
the case for most of the next several
seasons).
Director/playwright George C. Wolfe
makes Broadway debut with Jelly’s Last
Jam and wins Tony.
Ten women accuse Republican Senator
Robert Packwood of sexual harassment
(22 Nov.).
U.S. jobless rate is at a five-year high.
81
The Broadway commercial theatre
experiences a surfeit of film stars,
including Richard Dreyfuss, Gene
Hackman, Glenn Close, Alan Alda, Ben
Gazzara, Joan Collins, Judd Hirsch,
Jessica Lange, and Alec Baldwin. Their
presence creates the illusion of
prosperity.
In TV address President George Bush
announces commitment of U.S. forces to
help UN relief effort in Somalia,
“Operation Restore Hope.” 28,000 U.S.
military personnel scheduled to be
dispatched. On 9 December U.S. troops
land in Somalia.
Czech and Slovak regional parliaments
adopt joint resolutions authorizing the
separation of Czechoslovakia into two
separate independent republics
(17 Nov.).
UN authorizes the blockade of
Yugoslavia (Nov.).
DATES
1993
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (part
one, Millennium Approaches), opens 4
May and wins Tony.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Bill Clinton becomes President.
The Kentucky Cycle (winner of 1992
Pulitzer) has brief run on Broadway.
A bomb set by Islamic fundamentalists
explodes beneath World Trade Center in
New York City, killing 6 people
(26 February).
A revival of The Who’s 1969 rock opera
Four federal agents killed in
Tommy opens to gigantic ticket sales and confrontation with Branch Davidian cult
critical success.
led by David Koresh (28 Feb.). Seventytwo succumb during an inferno in
compound in April.
82
Irish playwright Frank McGuinness’s
Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me is a hit
on Broadway.
Broadway officially celebrates its 100th
birthday.
As in recent years, New York’s
institutional theatres offer most of the
serious dramatic fare.
Broadway openings include
Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig,
Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, and
Kiss of the Spider Woman, book by
McNally, music and lyrics by Kander and
Ebb (Tony for Best Musical).
A mysterious illness kills ten in the
Southwest (29 May).
Jurassic Park opens, setting the record
for largest opening day box office
earnings, with $18.2 million in first day
gross ticket sales (11 June).
The Chicago Bulls led by Michael Jordan
win their third straight NBA title
(20 June).
Midwest suffers disaster when
Mississippi River floods. Fifty die, 70,000
left homeless and without drinking water,
and eight million acres inundated (July).
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney
steps down, resigning as leader of the
Progressive Conservative Party
(24 February).
Apartheid rule ends in South Africa.
Chris Hani, Secretary General of the
South African Communist Party and
leader of the African National Congress,
is assassinated (10 April).
President of Sri Lanka Ranasingha
Premadasa is assassinated (23 April).
The IRA explodes a bomb in London’s
financial district, razing buildings, killing
one, and injuring forty-five (24 April).
The military ousts President Serrano
Elias of Guatemala (25 May).
Germany restricts access to immigrants
seeking asylum (28 May).
Moderate Yugoslavian President Dobrica
Cosic is ousted (1 June).
Actress Helen Hayes dies in March at age U.S. military issues its “Don’t ask, don’t
ninety-two.
tell” policy on homosexuals for their
admissibility in armed forces (19 July).
AIDS is a major topic in both serious and
comic plays (such as Paul Rudnick’s
Jeffrey).
Deputy White House counsel Vincent
Foster is found shot to death in a park in
Washington, D.C., an apparent suicide
(20 July).
In an attempt to bolster business, Las
Vegas entertainment establishments
cater more to family patrons.
The Pope attends a Youth Festival in
Colorado (11 Sept.).
83
1994
Adrian Mitchell’s adaptation of Gogol’s
The Government Inspector bombs on
Broadway (6 Jan.).
Vietnam-era radical Kathleen Ann Power
surrenders, having been on the run for
thirteen years from a robbery charge
(Sept.).
Basketball star Michael Jordan retires
(6 Oct.); returns in 1995.
Toni Morrison wins the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
Clinton approves of a naval blockade
around Haiti to prevent immigrants into
the country.
The PLO and Israel exchange letters of
mutual recognition and sign an
agreement on Palestinian autonomy in
Israeli-occupied territory (Sept.).
Yeltsin routs foes in a bloody
confrontation, which leaves 187 dead
(Oct.).
Irish actor Cyril Cusack dies at age
eighty-two.
Civil war in Rwanda results in massacre.
30,000 are expected to die from cholera
alone. A UN relief mission is announced
by President Clinton to be readying
supplies and first aid for country.
Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women opens On 19 August President Clinton revises
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia opens in
Off-Broadway, the first New York opening U.S. immigration asylum policies, turning London and ranks among his better
for the playwright in eleven years
away thousands of Cubans attempting to efforts.
(13 Feb.). Wins Pulitzer.
flee the economic hardships of their
homeland.
David Richards replaces Frank Rich for a Republican party wins majority of seats
As produced by the Royal National
short tenure as New York Times drama
in both the U.S. Senate and House of
Theatre, Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass is
critic (March).
Representatives.
far more successful in London than on
Broadway. In general, Miller has fared
well in the UK during the 1980s and
1990s, while being virtually ignored in
the U.S.
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
A revival of Clifford Odets’s The
Flowering Peach (1954) opens at Lyceum
Theatre in New York (20 March).
84
1995
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Republican “Contract With America”
threatens to eliminate or drastically to
cut funding for NEA, NEH, and PBS.
Battles continues into 1997.
Movie attendance in the U.S. reaches
1,291,700, a record in thirty-five years of
tracking attendance.
Kushner’s Perestroika, part two (joined
part one in fall 1993) of Angels in
America, wins Tony for Best Play.
New musical productions, many revivals,
including Lloyd Webber’s Sunset
Boulevard (cost $13 million), Sondheim’s
Passion, stage version of film Beauty and
the Beast, Hal Prince’s production of
Show Boat, and revivals of Damn
Yankees, Grease, and Carousel.
Michael John LaChiusa emerges as new
musical talent with Hello Again (based
on Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde) at
Lincoln Center.
Composer Jule Styne dies at age
eighty-eight.
Neil Simon ignores Broadway and has
Football-media star O.J. Simpson
London Suite produced Off-Broadway.
accused of brutally murdering his wife
and Ron Goldman, his wife’s friend, but
is later acquitted.
Broadway’s output during the 1994–95
Death of former Chief Justice of the
season is anemic. Some of the most
Supreme Court, Warren Burger, 25 June,
critically acclaimed productions are
at age eighty-seven.
imports or revivals: Stoppard’s Arcadia,
Cocteau’s Indiscretion (Les Parents
Terribles), Hamlet (with Ralph Fiennes),
Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress,
Turgenev’s A Month in the Country.
15 million people around the world
communicate on the Internet.
During the spring Europe, Russia, and
U.S. commemorate the 50th anniversary
of victory in Europe; 6 August, 50th
anniversary of A-bombing of Japan.
McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!
transfers successfully from Off-Broadway
to Broadway.
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey
168 lives lost in bombing of federal
Circus celebrates 125th anniversary;
building in Oklahoma City (April).
plans made to add new international
touring units by 1997.
Revival of How to Succeed in Business
Without Really Trying among few
musical hits of spring 1995.
Broadway ticket prices rise to top of $75.
85
1996
Fall 1995, Carol Channing and Julie
Andrews return to the Broadway stage.
Rent, hit musical by Jonathan Larson,
receives Pulitzer and Tony.
100th running of the Boston Marathon.
Opening of New Victory Theatre, first
major step in reclaiming of Forty-second
Street.
1997
Broadway productions number thirtynine for 1995–96 season (up from
preceding season’s twenty-eight), with
the highest grossing season ever
(c. $430 million).
Broadway gross receipts set new record;
attendance second highest in history.
Abstract expressionist Willem De
Kooning dies in March at age ninety-two.
Cult blamed for 20 March nerve gas
attack on Tokyo’s subway which kills
twelve and sickened more than 5,500.
Jacques Chirac becomes President of
France, replacing François Mitterrand.
50th anniversary of United Nations
(June).
HIV infections increased by a record 4.7
million; epicenter for AIDS cases shifts
from Africa to Asia.
David Hare’s Skylight premieres at Royal
National Theatre; critical success in New
York in 1996 with Michael Gambon.
Assassination of Israel Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin (Nov.).
Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu defeats
Shimon Peres to become Prime Minister
of Israel.
Boris Yeltsin elected to second term as
President of Russia (July).
UK’s worst ever mass shooting, at a
primary school in Dunblane, Scotland
(March).
China’s Deng Xiaoping dies at age
ninety-two (Feb.).
DATES
THEATRICAL EVENTS IN AMERICA
Four new musicals open in time for Tony
Award consideration; the big winner
among them is the $10 million Titanic,
while even more successful is the revival
of Chicago.
Surprise play hit of the season is the
Off-Broadway production of Paula Vogel’s
How I Learned to Drive, while the revival
of A Doll’s House is big Tony winner.
Renovated Amsterdam Theatre reopens
on Forty-second Street.
Cats becomes Broadway’s longest
running musical.
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL
EVENTS IN AMERICA
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg dies in April at
age seventy.
Labour Party assumes control in Great
Britain, as John Major is defeated in
election, and Tony Blair becomes Prime
Minister.
Timothy McVeigh found guilty of
Oklahoma City bombing in June.
William Burroughs, author of The Naked
Lunch, dies at age eighty-three (August).
Hong Kong returns to Chinese control at
midnight, 30 June.
Britain’s Princess Diana killed in car
accident (31 Aug.) while evading pursuit
of paparazzi. A week later (5 Sept.),
Mother Teresa (b. 1910), dies of heart
failure.
86
1998
SELECTED HISTORICAL/CULTURAL EVENTS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
Film actors Robert Mitchum and Jimmy
Frank Sinatra dies in May (b. 1915).
Stewart die early summer.
Dramaturge’s attempt to be legally
designated as co-author of Rent fails in
court.
Ragtime and The Lion King major musical
hits, the latter winning the Tony for Best
Musical. Its director, Julie Taymor, wins
Best Director for a Musical Award and
Irish director Garry Hynes wins Best
Director for a Play Award (the first
women in history to win these awards).
Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive
wins Pulitzer.
1
American Theatre in Context:
1945–Present
Arnold Aronson
Introduction
The history of the United States, more than that of most nations, has been
depicted as a grand and heroic narrative – a great epic of the triumph of the
human spirit over adversity, the victory of good over evil, and the success of
the individual in the face of enormous odds. From colonial times well into the
twentieth century, the theatre was not only a reflection of this mythology, it
was a crucial instrument for the molding of public perceptions. Prior to the
birth of the movies – which did not really become a mass medium until the
1910s – theatre, especially in its popular incarnations, such as circus, vaudeville, and minstrel shows, was the closest thing to a national forum that the
country had. Ideas were debated, public opinion was formulated, and national
consciousness was achieved on the stages of American playhouses. In this
context, the melodrama – the dominant form of the nineteenth century – was
something close to American classicism. It created such quintessential figures
as Mose the Bowery B’hoy, Nimrod Wildfire, Jonathan, and their kin – all
symbols of the young, energetic, and fundamentally good American society,
and all players in the grand story. As long as the American narrative was
unfolding, the popular drama was a critical tool for the dissemination of ideas
and the creation of a national sense of unity and purpose. But World War I
began to reshape American consciousness as the country was no longer one
player among many on the world stage but a protagonist; World War II continued the transformation of global politics and economics while permanently
altering America’s international position and fundamentally transforming
American life and sensibility. The “story of America” was seen as entering a
new phase, possibly a final chapter in which Manifest Destiny was to be
achieved. In such a situation theatre, indeed all the arts, would play a new role.
The aftermath of World War II complicated the narrative. The designation
of that conflagration as the “last good war” was a reflection of the war as melodrama. The U.S. and the Allies were the “good guys” beset by the evil Axis
87
88
American Theatre in Context
powers. Hitler and Hirohito were, on some levels, Simon Legree-type characters – villains to be vanquished – and their defeat was the inevitable end of a
real cliffhanger. (Stalin, it should be remembered, was transformed into
“Uncle Joe” for the war years to make him into the friend of the “good guy.”)
In the immediate afterglow of victory, many Americans saw the war in those
simple terms (and many continue to do so). Yet upon closer examination, not
all aspects of the conduct of the war fit the dramatic archetype. The use of
atomic weapons on Japan and the failure to take action against the concentration camps, for instance, called into question the moral purity and motives of
the United States – the putative protagonist in this melodrama. In the twentyfive years or so following the war the emergence of the Cold War, the rising
tensions of race relations, the growing awareness of poverty, the wars in
Korea and Vietnam, and even a discomfort with the materialism of the
“affluent society” all contributed to a re-evaluation of American society and
erosion of the archetype. In the postwar era, the melodrama lost its validity
as a paradigm for society. Melodramatic heroes were replaced by so-called
anti-heroes, action was replaced by introspection, clear-cut morality was
replaced by ambiguity, and the traditional dramatic model was replaced by
free-form structures or structures devoid of meaningful content. With theatre
no longer providing the superstructure for the understanding of the society
at large, it lost its role as a primary outlet for cultural expression and exploration.
It is difficult at the end of the twentieth century to imagine how central the
theatre once was to the social and cultural life of the United States. The years
between the two world wars are now seen as a golden age in American theatre
and drama. In the first half of the century, the musical achieved its mature
form, a large number of significant playwrights emerged for the first time in
American history, comedy became both exuberant and sophisticated, a comparatively strong African American theatre began to develop, popular entertainments thrived, and an American avant-garde began to emerge. This was
also the period in which the Art Theatre or Little Theatre movement swept
over the country, introducing American audiences to the dramas, ideas, and
techniques of the European avant-garde in the teens and twenties and to the
politically engaged agit props and social dramas of the thirties.
Despite the diversity and variety of this theatre it was contained under one
roof, as it were; all the component pieces were perceived and experienced as
different aspects of a single entity known simply as theatre or entertainment.
Because of this unity a sense of nationhood was visible and an identifiably
American voice began to emerge from this lively conglomeration of theatrical
expression. Out of the theatrical cauldron came a distinctly American style in
acting, language, and design. The Group Theatre in the 1930s began to explore
the psychological realism of Stanislavsky and other offshoots of the Moscow
Arnold Aronson
89
Art Theatre, while, at the same time, the ongoing love affair with British
theatre and actors actually paved the way for the ideas of French innovators
in a line of influence from Jacques Copeau through Michel Saint-Denis by way
of London’s Old Vic. Poetic diction could be found in the plays of Eugene
O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, and most especially William Saroyan, while
Maxwell Anderson plunged into neo-Elizabethan verse drama. The New
Stagecraft of Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Lee Simonson
supplanted the naturalism of David Belasco with symbolism and simplification, creating a scenographic equivalent to the abstraction of contemporary
art. The dominant American style on the eve of World War II was characterized by psychological realism in acting, poetic diction in playwriting (applied
to dark, gritty explorations of society that derived from the melodrama and
the well-made play), and a semi-abstract, emblematic stage design. All in all,
it was a seemingly incongruous pastiche of nineteenth-century American traditions dominated by melodrama, and early twentieth-century European
avant-gardism that somehow coalesced into a fertile theatre.
The end of World War II brought unprecedented wealth and power to the
United States and historical precedents suggest that such hegemony might
have presaged a vigorous and energetic theatre as in Elizabethan England, the
France of Louis XIV, or fifth-century Athens. But this was not to be. A certain
confidence, sense of well-being, and exuberance, of course, did manifest itself
in American culture, but more often in consumer goods than in art. Cars, for
example, began to sprout tailfins – futuristic icons of useless excess – with the
1948 Cadillac; homes began to fill with gleaming white appliances; sleek
“entertainment centers” disguised as furniture became the centerpieces of
living rooms, and movies increasingly abandoned the “noir” tones of black
and white for the saturated colors of Technicolor. Economist John Kenneth
Galbraith popularized the term “affluent society” in a 1958 book to describe
the sated, consumerist culture. Because the term implied a general material
prosperity, it suggested a more democratic form of wealth than that of earlier
generations. This was a whole society that shared in the riches, not a small
sect of robber barons. The truth was, of course, that while the general standards of living were raised significantly for most people, and the middle class
had a heretofore unheard-of purchasing power, there were still significant disparities within the society and disturbingly large segments of poverty.
Galbraith also made the point that private affluence was being acquired at the
expense of public service and civic needs. Nonetheless, this affluence, too,
seemed the logical denouement for the American melodrama. A muscular and
ebullient sense of triumph and joy was tangible in some movies – Singin’ in the
Rain is an excellent example – though a darker, more troubled genre also
began to emerge, particularly in the filmed versions of several of the plays of
Tennessee Williams and William Inge. To be sure, the American theatre in the
90
American Theatre in Context
second half of the twentieth century witnessed its share of significant dramas
and playwrights – many of which now constitute the American canon – the
birth (and ultimate mainstreaming) of an American avant-garde, a period of
spirited and innovative musical theatre, the transformation of design into an
art, and the spread of resident professional theatres across the country. But
the combined forces of economics, politics, technology, and demographic
upheavals conspired to remove the theatre from its position of centrality in
American culture and transform it into peripheral entertainment divorced
from the community at large. As American society became increasingly fragmented in the postwar years it was mirrored in a fragmented theatre by an
increasingly introspective and highly ambiguous drama. Film, television,
popular music, and new technologies combined to eviscerate the traditional
theatregoing audience. Insofar as the theatre retained any relevance to a
national discourse it was as a tool for localized political and social debate.
Insofar as it retained a role in popular culture it was primarily as leisure-time
spectacle typified by the extravaganzas of Las Vegas, the circus, and theme
parks.
The Emerging Postwar Consciousness
Less than a year before the United States joined the combatants of World War
II, Henry Luce, head of the Time-Life Corporation, famously declared this the
“American Century” in a Life magazine essay. Primarily an appeal to join the
Allies in the escalating war in Europe, Luce’s essay argued that the unique position, history, and wealth of the United States created a moral obligation for it
to be the guarantor of freedom around the globe and to establish international
free trade, feed the world’s population, and send forth its distinctly twentiethcentury technology and culture. “We know how lucky we are compared to all
the rest of mankind,” he wrote. “At least two-thirds of us are just plain rich compared to all the rest of the human family – rich in food, rich in clothes, rich in
entertainment and amusement, rich in leisure, rich” (quoted in Luce, Ideas,
107). At the end of the war, as if following Luce’s exhortations, the United
States was indeed the wealthiest, most powerful, most technologically
advanced nation on earth. It imprinted itself indelibly upon the twentieth
century, essentially shaping the world for years to come. Paradoxically for a
nation historically in the cultural shadow of Europe, the most long-lasting and
pervasive export has been American culture spread primarily through the
machinery of movies, television, and popular music. But this new-found power
was accompanied from the start by underlying American discomfort with
such dominance and a constant questioning of our moral obligations in the
world. This uneasiness has informed postwar art in both form and content.
Arnold Aronson
91
The American century also meant that the visual and performing arts were
transforming from absorbing international influences to a position of generating influence. A growing class of wealthy art patrons and the presence of a
sizable body of European émigré artists between the wars fostered a creative
ferment, invigorated the American art scene, and inspired a generation of
young American artists. When World War II effectively ended European dominance of the art world, American culture was able to rush in and fill the
vacuum. New York City in particular emerged not only as the cultural capital
of the United States but of the world; all strands of the grand narrative seemed
headed for triumphant conclusion. Sounding a bit like Luce, writer Clifton
Fadiman could state in a 1940 radio discussion, “We have reached a critical
point in the life of our nation. We are through as a pioneer nation; we are now
ready to develop as a civilization” (quoted in Guilbaut, How New York Stole the
Idea of Modern Art, 57). But it was critic Clement Greenberg, the primary articulator of the new formalist American aesthetic, who astutely perceived the
inextricable connections between the development of a new art and international supremacy. “The main premises of Western art,” he wrote, “have at last
migrated to the United States along with the center of gravity of production
and political power” (quoted in Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art, 172).
Freed of its subservience to European art and ideas and supported by a
growing network of galleries, a unique American voice emerged, embodied in
artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko,
and Barnett Newman. Similarly, what was for all intents and purposes the first
generation of American composers and conductors appeared, including
Leonard Bernstein, Milton Babbitt, and Lukas Foss. And the center of the
dance world followed the other arts to New York – modern dance had
European origins but found its mature expression in American choreographers and companies while postmodern dance was an almost purely
American phenomenon. Theatre, too, began to explore new avenues of
expression and by the sixties and seventies the American avant-garde was in
the forefront of international theatre. Yet, unlike the situation in art or dance,
this avant-garde movement did not supplant the established or traditional
theatre that preceded it.
There are many possible explanations for the failure of theatre to evolve as
the other arts did, the most immediate and compelling being the profound
demographic changes that radically altered the constituency and attendance
habits of theatre audiences. Another factor is the nature of the arts themselves. The primarily non-objective, emblematic, and symbolic vocabularies
of music, visual art, and even dance allowed those forms to change more
rapidly than theatre in response to shifting aesthetics and sensibilities,
whereas the nature of Western theatre, with its narrative explorations of
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human interactions and emotions, has historically kept it in an essentially
realistic framework. But in the aftermath of the atrocities of World War II, and
faced with the overwhelming fear of nuclear Armageddon that pervaded consciousness during the Cold War, a realistic drama seemed feeble and impotent. “Naturalism is no longer adequate, either aesthetically or morally, to
cope with the modern horror,” declared critic Dwight MacDonald (quoted by
Guilbaut, “The New Adventures of the Avant-garde in America,” in Frascina,
Pollock and After, 160). Certainly a theatre in which characters could do little
more than talk about “the bomb” seemed painfully useless. At the same time
Clement Greenberg warned painters against a polemic art. “In the face of
current events,” he cautioned, in order for modern art to be successful it must
emulate “the greatest painter of our time, Matisse” who “wanted his art to be
an armchair for the tired businessman” (quoted in Guilbaut, “The New
Adventures,” 159).
The elements that comprised the underlying vocabulary of naturalism
remained visible in the new forms of art and theatre; however they now functioned not as building blocks of a narrative but as independent aesthetic
objects. “The vernacular repertoire,” explained art historian William C. Seitz
in a 1961 essay,
includes beat Zen and hot rods, mescalin experiences and faded flowers,
photo-graphic bumps and grinds, the poubelle (i.e., trash can), juke boxes,
and hydrogen explosions. Such objects are often approached in a mystical,
aesthetic, or “arty” way, but just as often they are fearfully dark, evoking
horror or nausea: the anguish of the scrap heap; the images of charred
bodies that keep Hiroshima and Nagasaki before our eyes; the confrontation
of democratic platitudes with the Negro’s disenfranchisement . . . (The Art
of Assemblage, 88–89)
His catalogue of elements, of course, is a prosaic echo of Allen Ginsberg’s
classic Beat poem Howl, which chronicled the “best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves
through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, /. . . . listening to
the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox” (Howl, 9–10). The theatre and art
that emerged in the forties and fifties drew inspiration from the raw energy,
form, and content of American pop culture and iconography, the wonder and
fear of new technologies and media, and from the conflicting chaos of urban
society.
If the artists of the postwar era expressed a degree of fear of nuclear annihilation and distrust of the establishment it was at least in part because the
American government tended to situate everything in the context of national
security – preparation for war against the Soviets. The interstate highway
system, for instance, was initially the National Defense Highway system,
designed to move military equipment and personnel efficiently around the
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country; the National Science Foundation was a response to the perceived
advantage the Soviets had in military technology; support for schools came
under the heading of the National Defense Education Act. It was, of course,
harder to justify support for the arts as a factor in national security, but the
emergence of a plethora of federal agencies which had a direct impact on daily
life created an atmosphere in which support for the arts seemed plausible,
and at the height of the Cold War, culture was a significant tool in international
diplomacy. And it was, strangely enough, the identification of American
Abstract Expressionism with democratic ideals that allowed modern art to
move out of avant-garde fringes and into the mainstream, thereby making the
funding of such art somehow patriotic.
The modern art movement in America captured the mantle of democratic
righteousness after the war through a sort of “buy American” campaign, suggesting that supporting modern artists was virtually a patriotic duty.
American artists were elevated to a level and prestige previously conferred
only on European painters and sculptors. Not only serious critics, but the
popular press such as Life magazine, began to pay attention to the new wave
of artists and saw in them the new American spirit; they saw an art appropriate for the new postwar order. The process of acceptance was aided by the
essentially apolitical nature of the new art, particularly Abstract
Expressionism. This was in marked contrast to much art and especially
theatre of the interwar years, which had been predominantly left-wing in its
sympathies. At a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948 art critic
Paul Burlin announced, “Modern painting is the bulwark of the individual
creative expression, aloof from the political left and its blood brother, the
right. Their common dictators, if effective, would destroy the artist” (quoted
in Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 181). The practitioners of this new art became new American folk heroes in the tradition of the
pioneers and so-called “modern art” became a de facto official art in the United
States.
The theatre in 1945, weighted down with tradition, a formidable infrastructure, and an audience with no overt desire to overthrow the status quo, was
ponderous and slow to change. But the changing aspects of American culture
and society would serve to undermine theatre’s function and audience.
Mainstream theatre had served two primary roles in the prewar years: it was
“entertainment for the tired business man” or it was a source of ideas and a
forum for discussion. By the fifties, however, much of the entertainment function had been ceded to television, and the political atmosphere stifled the
more open and visible forms of public debate.
America’s entrance into the war had an immediate effect upon the content
and style of drama. The whole genre of political drama as well as the social
investigation that typified so much drama in the years following World War I
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seemed to evaporate overnight. Politics were now determined by military alliances, moral ambiguity gave way to fervent patriotism, and entertainment
functioned in service to the war effort. It was important to see the nation as a
unified whole; to focus on individual groups within society, to emphasize difference, or to question the fabric of American life was seen as counterproductive, even anti-patriotic. Thus, the rising tide of black theatre artists and
companies dissipated, and the socially and politically oriented groups – from
the Federal Theatre Project and Group Theatre, through the small workers’
theatres, already on shaky economic and artistic legs – simply disappeared.
But without the social, political, and intellectual ferment, the drama suffered.
The American theatre during the war years produced an unusually mediocre
crop of plays and musicals, perhaps the most uninteresting four or five
Broadway seasons of the century. There were, to be sure, a few notable exceptions, and in these exceptions could be seen the seeds of what was to come.
The rising fascination with Freudianism, psychotherapy, and the mysterious workings of the mind was evident in Richard Rodgers’s and Lorenz Hart’s
Pal Joey (1940). Just as the European Naturalistic movement of the 1870s was
grounded in the belief that objective examination of the underside of society
could lead to the healing of social ills, the contemporary popular understanding of Freudianism assumed that exploring the darker recesses of the psyche
was the best way to understand human behavior. This musical put morally
complex, even repugnant characters at the center of the story and created a
dark and cynical atmosphere that repelled many critics and baffled some of
the audience, though it demonstrated that the musical could be a vehicle for
dark and disturbing themes. Freudianism on a somewhat lighter note was the
basis of Lady in the Dark (1941) by Kurt Weill and Moss Hart. Weill also
brought American jazz, via the filter of a European sensibility, to the American
stage. Musical innovation of another kind arrived two years later, when the
new team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II created Oklahoma!
While thematically this musical reverted to the sentimentality and lyricism of
earlier American drama and musical comedy (it was based on Lynn Riggs’s
play of 1931, Green Grow the Lilacs) and possessed a certain earnestness of
spirit associated with Americana plays of the twenties, structurally it would
alter musical theatre for almost two decades (see discussion of Oklahoma! in
Volume 2). Taking the integration of music, lyrics, and plot that had been bubbling beneath the surface at least since the Jerome Kern–Guy Bolton Show
Boat (1927), Oklahoma! created a contemporary, American folk-pop-operetta
style. And while George Balanchine had choreographed ballet sequences in
the 1936 On Your Toes, Agnes de Mille’s choreography for Oklahoma! used
ballet as a motif for advancing the plot and created a genre of theatrical dance.
The one significant play of the war years was Thornton Wilder’s The Skin
of Our Teeth (1942). Its self-referential dialogue, breaking of the fourth wall,
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comic yet sometimes obscure symbolism, epic structure, and proto-Absurdist
content served as a harbinger of a range of experimental theatre to come that
vigorously and almost gleefully rejected the predominant American penchant
for naturalism and sentimentality.
Of less quantifiable impact was the presence of refugee artists escaping the
Nazis. Two who had significant influence on the development of the theatre
were Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. While Brecht’s residence in the US
from 1941 to 1947 had few tangible manifestations – he worked on one film and
several of his plays were translated and performed, but for very short runs
that made almost no critical impression – it would have long-range effects by
laying the groundwork for a new politically engaged theatre and the use of
alienation or estrangement as a dramatic tool. Most of the translations of
Brecht’s work were done by scholar and playwright Eric Bentley, who almost
single-handedly introduced Brecht’s plays and theories to the U.S. after the
war. Piscator, meanwhile, ran the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for
Social Research in New York from 1939 to 1951, where he staged some 100
experimental works. These productions introduced a generation to the principles of epic theatre, and in his classes he influenced many of the practitioners of the postwar generation, including Judith Malina, a co-founder of the
Living Theatre.
It was the arrival of Tennessee Williams on the theatrical scene, however,
that signaled a genuine shift in American drama with The Glass Menagerie,
which premiered a few months before the war’s end in the spring of 1945.
Williams stood at the nexus of melodrama and psychotherapy. His plays took
the by-now classic American themes of home and family and, using an essentially melodramatic vocabulary of a lost past, unrequited love, and yearnings
for a better future, explored the inner workings of societally marginal characters. Although Amanda and Laura are the focus of the play, it is in the characters of Jim, the gentleman caller who failed to fulfill his potential yet who sells
himself as the epitome of the American striver (he is planning to take advantage of the newest technology, television), and especially Tom, the son straining against the stifling atmosphere of the home but with no plans other than
unarticulated yearnings for excitement, that Williams has created the postwar
American characters. Tom is the prototype of the anti-hero, the rebel without
a cause. (Though recent criticism sees Tom as autobiographical and therefore
gay, so his rebellion actually does have a cause – just one that could not be
articulated in 1945.)
In terms of dramatic technique, Williams’s significant contribution was to
find a theatrical framework by which the audience was allowed into the inner
workings of the minds and souls of the characters without reverting to the
often contrived and self-conscious theatrical devices earlier employed by
Eugene O’Neill. Though not a political or morality play, The Glass Menagerie
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worked as metaphor for the country on the verge of something new, yet filled
with doubts and insecurities and unwilling to let go of a romanticized past.
Stylistically, it drew upon the poetic atmosphere of the Symbolists, the associative world of the Surrealists, and the use of projections first exploited by
Piscator, to create what Williams called a memory play. Following in the footsteps of William Saroyan, Williams created the genre of poetic realism or
American symbolism, which is the closest thing the US had to a national style
for the next fifteen years.
A contributing factor to the success of the play, and a significant element
in establishing poetic realism as the dominant style, was the design by Jo
Mielziner. Never before in American theatre had design and text been so fully
integrated and so interdependent. Using scrims and painterly decor, Mielziner
created an ethereal look, while facilitating the cinematic flow from scene to
scene called for by Williams, and providing the ideal means for the depiction
of memory. In fact, much of the postwar theatre was dependent for its success
on a strong visual realization and an emotionally energetic acting style. The
creative team of Mielziner and director Elia Kazan, formerly of the Group
Theatre, together with Williams and later Arthur Miller, most notably in his
play Death of a Salesman, would create a series of productions that typified
the postwar style and that some would see as the pinnacle of American
theatre. To a large degree, this was the result of the development of the art of
lighting design. The effectiveness of the scrim, the creation of memory and
dream, and the cinematic flow were dependent on the precise and fluid use of
light. Jean Rosenthal, who worked with Orson Welles, and Abe Feder, both
beginning in the thirties, virtually created the profession of lighting designer
and went on to significant theatrical careers, while Mielziner, working with Ed
Kook and building upon the aesthetics of Rosenthal, transformed lighting into
an art.
As crucial to the success of the plays of Miller and Williams as the visual
environment were the acting and directing. Once again, the American fascination with psychology informed the development of acting style and led to a
major shift in the forties from a technical virtuosity to a more energetic emotionalism. Here, the influence of the Group Theatre of the thirties cannot be
overstated. Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler had championed the ideas of
Stanislavsky, though each drew upon a slightly different understanding of the
Russian director’s work. At root, they were interested in an emotionally truthful form of acting that emanated more from an internal and psychological
understanding of character than from external techniques. As Group Theatre
alumnus Elia Kazan emerged as the leading director of the late forties this
Americanized naturalistic style was melded with the poetic realism of the new
playwrights. Characterized by brooding portrayals, relaxed body language,
and a verbal style that, in contrast to the contemporary stage diction, seemed
to consist of mumbling and stuttering, the Kazan productions seethed with
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emotional turbulence and sexual tension that were revolutionary for the time.
Marlon Brando, who played Stanley Kowalski in Williams’s A Streetcar Named
Desire (1949), was the quintessence of this new style that was a direct challenge to the artificiality of stage decorum. He embodied the anti-hero – the
protagonist of the emotionally ambiguous postwar era. Kazan, with other
Group alumni Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford, created the Actors Studio
in 1947 as a workshop for Stanislavsky-inspired acting training. Lee Strasberg
joined in 1949 and soon became the sole director of the Studio. Under his autocratic leadership until his death in 1982, Strasberg trained several generations
of actors in what became known simply as “The Method.” Ironically, the
Strasberg approach became increasingly ineffective on the stage as
Absurdism, the neo-Expressionistic ensemble theatre movement, and various
avant-gardes transformed the American theatre from the late fifties onward,
but the Studio became the training ground for virtually the entire postwar
cadre of film actors. This group includes, aside from Brando, James Dean,
Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anne
Bancroft, Shelley Winters, Geraldine Page, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro,
and Al Pacino. In opposition to the rugged good looks or perfect beauty of
prewar movie stars and their unambiguous identification as either “good
guys” or villains, the postwar generation was idiosyncratic and flawed in their
physicality, and possessed of a moral ambiguity. The Method, which thrived
on personal quirks and emphasized the emotionality beneath the surface, was
ideal for a post-Holocaust, atomic society that was no longer certain of truth,
morality, or even beauty. (See Chapter 6 for additional commentary on “The
Method.”)
One might have expected the war itself to preoccupy playwrights in the late
1940s, but while it provided raw material for dozens of movies over several
decades and much fiction, including Norman Mailer’s debut novel The Naked
and the Dead, it was surprisingly absent from the postwar theatre. The war as
melodrama was fit for the entertainment needs of Hollywood, but playwrights
seemed more interested in the postwar American society and its discontents.
Arthur Miller’s first hit play All My Sons (1947) used the war as a background
for his moral exploration of individual responsibility, but it was set – as so
many American plays were – in a home in a small midwestern community. The
play was not about the war per se, but about the individual’s responsibility to
the larger society. The protagonist, Joe Keller, manufactured airplane parts
during the war. Putting profit ahead of morality, he sold defective parts to the
army, leading to the deaths of several fliers and ultimately the suicide of his
son. With this play Miller established himself as the keeper of America’s conscience, but it was not an investigation of war.
One of the only other theatre pieces to represent the war was Rodgers’s
and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, which opened in the spring of 1949. The plot
ostensibly dealt with fairly serious material. Set on an island in the South
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Pacific during World War II, it involved a mission by the American servicemen
to establish a secret base on a nearby enemy-held island. It also dealt with
issues of interracial romance and marriage. Although the latter issue had been
addressed in varying degrees in the twenties and thirties, it was starkly absent
from the mainstream drama of the immediate postwar years and was something that only black playwrights seemed to confront until well into the
sixties. Yet the issue was ultimately side-stepped in South Pacific. By placing
it in an exotic location, the issue became not white and black, but white and
Polynesian. The potential moral dilemma raised by the romance between the
American serviceman Cable and the native woman Liat was avoided by having
Cable killed during the mission, a ploy that provided a melodramatically
moving emotional peak, but seemed narratively too contrived or convenient.
Despite the potentially profound themes of South Pacific, it is best remembered as a comic romance that produced such memorable songs as “Some
Enchanted Evening,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” and
“There Is Nothing Like a Dame.” The popularity of the songs is, of course, a
tribute to Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s appealing score and lyrics, but it was
also a factor of a happy coincidence – the development of the long-playing
record. Although cast recordings, especially in England, date back to the
beginning of the century, it was the ability to record a Broadway show’s score
on a single, lightweight record that created a recording goldmine. For some
fifteen years, from South Pacific until 1964’s Hello, Dolly!, Broadway cast
recordings regularly topped the Billboard popular music charts. Since musicals were more widely known through cast recordings than the actual production, for many people the musical was tantamount to its score or, more
precisely, its cast album; the book became secondary at best and a show’s
themes and ideas could become divorced from its music if the songs did not
directly address them. So while most serious postwar drama virtually ignored
World War II, the most devastating conflagration in human history, and virtually no drama dealt with the deep-seated American dilemma of racial conflict,
South Pacific, a musical, at least, confronted them. Yet for those who knew only
the cast album, the issues were hidden at best. The operetta form of the
American musical comedy, in which romance, song and dance, and lavish scenography were the paramount issues, undermined the ability of musicals to
be a locus for serious social debate. (See Maslon, Chapter 2, “Broadway,” on
cast recordings.)
Economics and Demographics
At the start of the nineteenth century New York City emerged as the commercial and theatrical capital of the nation and, by the late nineteenth century,
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American theatre was essentially divided into New York and “the Road” –
touring theatre that originated in or emanated from New York. The New York
theatre had, from its earliest days, been physically centered around
Broadway, but like a demographic barometer it followed the movement of
New York’s population center up Broadway as the wealthy citizenry moved
uptown. A theatrical building boom during the first three decades of the twentieth century anchored the theatre district firmly around the Times Square
area and “Broadway” became a catchall term for mainstream theatre.
The economic structure of Broadway prior to World War I was based on relatively inexpensive labor, materials, and real estate, and sizable income from
“the Road.” Low ticket prices meant that audiences from nearly all strata of
society could afford to go to the theatre, creating a situation akin in some
respects to that of Elizabethan London. There were seven or more widely read
newspaper critics of more or less equal weight, thereby guaranteeing that no
single critic or paper could determine the fate of a production. Accessible and
affordable theatre meant that audiences would not wait for “blockbusters”
but might venture to see a show simply because it had a popular actor,
enchanting scenery, or an element of novelty. With live performance as the
primary form of entertainment, theatregoing was a regular practice for much
of the population. The Broadway of the interwar years was in some ways a
monolithic theatre engine that spewed forth a multifaceted product consisting of a vast array of dramas, comedies, musicals, revues, variety shows, revivals, and even ice shows and operettas. (The New York Times, in its annual
end-of-season wrap up, classified shows according to these categories, but
tellingly included them under the single heading of the “New York theatre
season”; it was all theatrical entertainment.) The idea of niche-productions,
cult, or elitist theatre that would come to comprise a significant proportion of
the productions by the nineties, was a barely visible component, apparent
only in the labor theatres and ethnic and racial theatre companies of the thirties; and even these latter theatres were seen as a crucial part of the larger
entertainment structure. Given the wide variety of theatre that was produced
and the ability to take risks, Broadway contained, in a sense, its own research
and development arm that could continuously revitalize the theatre.
The combined effects of the Depression and World War II, however, altered
the economic and aesthetic structure, leading to the artistic fragmentation
and geographic decentralization of the American theatre. Although theatre
had withstood the early onslaught of film, the addition of television to the mix
beginning about 1948, in combination with a significant shift in audience demographics, signaled an end to theatre as the epicenter of cultural and intellectual life.
There had been a steady decline in the number of productions since the
mid-1920s. The season of 1925–26 was the peak for theatre weeks – a figure
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representing the number of shows playing each week times weeks in the
season – with 2,852.1 By contrast, the 1945–46 season recorded 1,420 theatre
weeks while by 1960–61 it had diminished to 1,210. Measured another way,
1927–28 was the peak season for new productions with 264 openings, whereas
the 1945–46 season witnessed only 76 and the 1960–61 season a then record
low of 48. By 1989–90 the season total for new productions was a mere 40, but
of that number only 10 were new American plays, 3 of which had been originated either Off-Broadway or in a regional theatre, and only 8 were new musicals; the remainder consisted of one-person shows, revivals, and Radio City
Music Hall revues. The decline after the twenties was exacerbated, of course,
by talkies and the Great Depression and, to some extent, radio, but live entertainment remained a staple of American culture. Furthermore, movies were
perceived almost exclusively as entertainment, whereas theatre – at least a
portion of it – remained the focal point of American intellectual life and, as
such, was seen to fill a role that movies could not. In the thirties, especially, it
seemed as if many of the great social, political, and moral debates of the time
were rehearsed upon the stage and continued in late-night discussions in restaurants and bistros afterward.
Radio, whatever its immediate effects on attendance, had a more long-term
impact on perceptions of entertainment. Radio was able to bring vaudeville
performers, film stars, music, soap operas, and news directly into homes.
Though it was a mass medium, it seemed to function on an intimate level: listeners felt as if broadcasts were directed only to them and developed personal relationships with, say, Rudy Vallee as he sang or Walter Winchell as he
reported his gossip. Audiences began to have different expectations of its performers and to develop a different relationship with celebrities.
But if the changing mood of the country was a factor in the shifting fortunes
of the theatre after World War II, the more critical shift in American theatre
resulted from a seismic demographic transformation that began after the war
and continued for the next quarter-century. Beneath the seeming calm of the
1950s lay radical changes in the American population that would have profound effects on all aspects of society. Between 1945 and 1960 the general population increased by 40.1 million to 180 million or by nearly 29 percent. The
overwhelming majority of this increase was in the suburbs, where 11 million
new houses were built between 1948–58 (out of 13 million overall). The large
middle class that had lived in New York and other urban centers, the societal
segment that had anchored the residential neighborhoods and fueled urban
mercantilism, began moving out to the suburbs as the postwar economic
boom bestowed its benefits upon them. During the sixties, some 900,000
whites moved out of New York. By 1960, one of three Americans lived in a
suburb. Historian Todd Gitlin expressed this transformation eloquently:
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The Puritan utopia of a “city on a hill” found its strange completion in the
flatlands of the American suburb. For growing numbers, daily life was delivered from the cramp of the city, lifted out to the half-wide, half-open spaces,
where the long-sought and long-feared American wilderness could be
trimmed back and made habitable. The prairie became the lawn; the ranch,
the ranch house; the saloon, the Formica bar. (The Sixties, 14)
Also by 1960 75 percent of families owned a car and 87 percent a television;
and it was the first society in history to have more college graduates than
farmers. The automobile culture replaced the urban culture, and roads and
highways received funding while urban mass transit deteriorated and was dismantled. Suburban communities and highways served as magnets for shopping centers and later malls that replaced the downtown centers and the
village greens. For those who had left the cities, there were fewer and fewer
reasons to return.
As the white middle class left the cities they were replaced in large part by
African Americans moving north from the rural south and Latino groups
moving from the Caribbean and Latin America, all hoping to benefit from the
perceived prosperity. From 1940 to 1960, 375,000 African Americans moved to
New York and the Latino population quadrupled, although the total population of the city declined. Thus, the economic base of the theatre of the previous decades was being lost, and the intellectual and cultural face of the city
was being altered. The new urban dwellers might have formed the basis of a
new audience, but a variety of factors worked against this development.
There was no voice representing the new populations and the potential new
audiences within the theatre world. And because the recent arrivals, in many
cases, lacked a theatregoing tradition, there was no compelling need to meet
their demands nor was there much impetus from within the communities to
create theatre. The production of theatre remained in the hands of the older
generation or at least the same segment of society that was deserting the
cities. The theatre had become so institutionalized that rather than attempting to change, it metaphorically dug in its heels.
The response by producers to the erosion of the audience was to try to lure
back the same audience. The single greatest cost increase for producers in the
fifties was advertising, which rose some 300 percent. Curtain time was
adjusted to meet the needs of suburban commuters – from 8:40 to 7:30 in 1971
and then back to 8:00, where it remains. The new suburbanites continued to
return to the city to attend the theatre for a while but such a journey was more
complex and certainly more costly than a mere subway or taxi ride. The cost
of a trip into the city, the demands of family, and the rise of suburban movie
theatres combined with the effects of television to alter theatregoing habits.
Although there was a continuous and significant drop in the number of
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productions in the decades after the war, the total audience remained more
or less constant. Attendance figures fluctuated from year to year by as much
as 20 percent, but on average the Broadway audience from the end of the war
through the 1960–61 season remained at about 7 million. And despite the continuing decline in new productions the overall attendance figures actually
rose through the seventies, peaking at 11 million in 1981 and then leveling off
at about 9 million ever since. But with theatre tickets three to ten times more
expensive than movies (through the sixties, the cheapest seats were competitive with movies, but prices began to skyrocket thereafter, reaching a $75 top
in 1996 against $9.00 for a movie, and, even so, the rise in ticket prices did not
keep pace with the rise in production costs), the greater effort to get to the
theatre, and the diminishing product, producers had to work harder to get the
audience into the seats. Audiences were becoming increasingly selective in
what they saw, willing to commit their time and dollars only to certified hits.
The unorthodox and iconoclastic shows that had once survived and even
thrived on the periphery of the great theatre machine were now banished to
increasingly obscure venues. The phenomenal salaries and fees that
Hollywood offered, especially with the birth of the television industry, lured
actors and, more significantly, writers away from the legitimate stage. The
result was a steady erosion of the number of new productions and an increasing conservatism on the part of producers fearful of losing ever larger sums
of money. Finally, the new technology of television had a staggering effect on
the theatre to a degree that the movies never had.
The statistics alone are sobering. The number of televisions sold in the
United States jumped from a mere 172,000 in 1948 to 5 million in 1950 to over
79 million in 1960, by which time 90 percent of American families were regular
viewers and the average viewer was watching an astounding forty-four hours
a week of programming – more time watching than working. So much time in
front of the small screen meant little or no time for theatre, reading, hobbies,
and a host of leisure-time activities. Even movie attendance dropped from 90
million a week in 1946 to 46 million a week in 1955.
Overshadowed by television, the theatre, once prestigious, ubiquitous, and
a mirror of national identity had, by the sixties, become an elitist entertainment aimed at a narrow segment of the population. Movies had taken over the
melodrama, the thesis drama, the well-made play, and the romantic comedy;
television had taken over vaudeville and all forms of popular entertainment,
including the domestic comedy that had held the stage since the time of
Menander.
In previous generations, in fact for virtually the entire history of theatre,
those aspects of performance that are lumped under the category of popular
entertainment had always constituted the foundation of theatre and provided
an ongoing thread. Whatever happened in the mainstream or elitist theatres,
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including the virtual elimination of such theatres periodically throughout
history, popular entertainment – singing, dancing, circus skills, comedy, and
domestic skits – remained almost unaltered. In any other time in history, such
entertainments would have sprung up in response to the needs of a changing
audience – they would have weathered the storms of debilitating economics
in the commercial theatre – and thus created a foundation for a revitalized
theatre. But television supplanted live popular performance. Everything that
might have been found in vaudeville houses, and much of the drama and
comedy that had been a staple of the popular Broadway stage for decades,
could now be found on television – and viewers did not even have to venture
out of the house. Even the circus was put on TV. In one sense, the transference
of popular entertainment to television meant that almost everyone could now
attend the “theatre”; mass entertainment had never been so “mass.” But on
the other hand, the possibility for local and ethnically focused entertainments
was being crushed beneath the weight of universal acceptance. The television
had become the primary tool for achieving the conformist society. The weekly
Ed Sullivan Show entered homes with a wider variety of entertainment than
most people had ever seen before, but now audiences from the industrial
northeast or rural south or western ranch lands, the Jew, the African
American, the Hispanic, the Asian, and the Anglican were all presented with a
bill of fare that either homogenized or obliterated individual voices, depending on one’s point of view.
By the early fifties, most people involved with the Broadway theatre began
to sound a note of panic as they recognized the situation. The pessimism was
plaintively expressed by critic John Chapman dispiritedly summing up the
season for The Best Plays of 1950–1951: “We must not look toward the future
with any great amount of confidence, for the American theatre . . . has been in
a decline during all the recent years. This decline has been both economic and
artistic. Inflation has caused the economic decline, and few people can afford
to be regular theatre goers any more” (v). In a history of Broadway twenty
years later, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson noted that theatre “as an
industry . . . was obsolete . . . After World War II, theater owners became
acutely conscious of a pitiless fact of life: a theatre could earn an income for
only twenty-two hours a week, making only meager use of the expensive land
it occupied” (Broadway, 417). Theatre was recognized as a business – an
industry – and it was measured accordingly.
The 1950s
The decade of the fifties was long perceived as a period of conformity and
stasis, although recent re-evaluations are challenging that view. Poet Robert
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Lowell, for instance, could write of “the tranquillized fifties” where “even the
man / scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, / has two children, a beach
wagon, a helpmate, / and is ‘a young Republican’” (“Memories of West Street,”
85). Eisenhower was depicted by comics as a president who spent more time
playing golf than running the country. It was the period of the “organization
man,” the corporate conformist described by social observer William Whyte.
The organization man had become so totally accepted as part of society by
the early sixties that even the humorless IBM Corporation could manage a
smile at itself by dressing the guides at its 1964 New York World’s Fair pavilion in gray flannel suits. Social philosopher C. Wright Mills wrote White Collar
in 1951 attacking the sales mentality that had overtaken the nation and supplanted middle-class independence. He followed this up in 1956 with the more
radical The Power Elite, which warned of the dangers of the corporate mentality and its power over all aspects of society as well as the dangers of the military–industrial complex. Vance Packard and David Riesman also warned of
the dangers of the increasingly consumerist society. These were not the muckraking books of the Upton Sinclair variety, exposing harmful and exploitative
business practices; these books warned of something more sinister – a kind
of brainwashing and a loss of individual freedoms and national spirit. The
dark side of Freudianism in the popular understanding was that if the mind
were ultimately quantifiable it must therefore be controllable as well. Those
with the right knowledge – and the wrong motives – be they corporations
selling you their product or Communist operatives taking over your soul, had
the ability to brainwash you, render you into a zombie-like agent of their
desires. (This was the message behind the chilling 1962 movie The
Manchurian Candidate.) These writings laid the groundwork for an “us vs.
them” mentality that pervaded the counterculture movements of the sixties.
“Us” was the everyday, everyman, individual; “them” was the “establishment”
of the government, military, and corporations or, in some contexts, the
Communists, who were depicted as melodramatically evil. Cartoonist Walt
Kelly, whose comic strip Pogo often skewered politicians, played upon this
perception of the world at the start of the environmental movement in the
early seventies. “We have met the enemy,” declared a character, “and he is us.”
The paranoid view of the world was captured in science fiction films and
comic books that became filled with menacing blobs, things, body-snatchers,
aliens, resurrected prehistoric monsters, and mutated – by atomic radiation
or science experiments gone wrong – creatures including rabbits, plants, and
housewives. The messages were plain and simple: Communists will steal your
soul as soon as you let down your guard; and whenever science tries to play
God it leads to tragic results.
Theatre has often been a stimulus for change or a challenge to a complacent culture, but the anti-Communist hysteria of the early fifties led by Senator
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Joseph McCarthy squelched a great deal of free expression – more through
intimidation than by direct action. Anti-Communist sentiment had existed in
the U.S. since the Russian revolution of 1917 and had led to the creation of the
House Un-American Activities Committee. In the postwar years the belief that
Communists were infiltrating every aspect of American society and government reached epidemic proportions. “Better Dead than Red” was the battle
cry of the political right. A wide range of individuals was investigated by
Congress for possible Communist activities or connections, but the McCarthy
hearings were virulent and used smear, innuendo, and intimidation. His investigations spread well beyond political figures and focused on high-profile and
sensational figures in theatre, film, and television. Mere accusation or association led to blacklisting, ruining the careers of many writers, directors, and
actors in all media. And with few exceptions, it led to the end of a theatre of
ideas. It was as if the war years were a kind of purgative for the theatre and
McCarthyism the death blow to a generation of playwrights. Of all the playwrights who had been successful before the war and who continued to
produce afterward, including Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Robert
Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, Elmer Rice, S.N. Behrman, William Saroyan –
almost all of whom were noted as intellectual and politically provocative
writers – not one met with anywhere near his or her previous success; none
produced a hit play or lasting contribution to dramatic literature in the
postwar years. Only Eugene O’Neill among the prewar playwrights achieved
postwar success and this came in posthumous premieres and revivals such
as Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Touch of the Poet, and A Moon for the
Misbegotten, after years of artistic eclipse. In the musical theatre, only Cole
Porter equaled his prewar success with the 1948 Kiss Me, Kate. The public
seemed to demand fresh voices for what was intuitively understood as a new
era.
Arthur Miller was the only new playwright to attempt a theatre of ideas –
somewhat in the tradition of Ibsen – and to confront contemporary politics.
The Crucible (1953), about the Salem witch trials, was a thinly veiled attack
upon McCarthyism, and A View from the Bridge (1955), which dealt with the
struggle between self-interest and self-sacrifice as well as codes of honor,
could be seen as a reflection of the moral dilemma of the times. But the majority of serious theatre moved toward psychological explorations. So prevalent
was Freudianism and to a lesser degree Jungian psychology, that a book entitled Freud on Broadway was published which provided Freudian underpinnings for much of the modern American theatre.2 The fascination with
Freudian psychology and psychotherapy in the postwar years might have
pushed the theatre toward psychological explorations of the individual in any
case, but the proscription against political theatre hastened the shift in
emphasis.
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Off-Broadway
One response to the decline of the theatre was the emergence of OffBroadway. In The Best Plays of 1934–1935, critic–editor Burns Mantle inaugurated a new category for revivals, classics, new plays, and even puppet and
children’s theatre performed in New York but outside the mainstream theatres of the Broadway district. He termed this “Off Broadway.” But the popular
conception of Off-Broadway as an artistic alternative to the commercial
theatre predates the thirties. In a sense its roots can be traced to the late-nineteenth-century art theatres of Europe such as Théâtre Libre, the Freie Bühne,
and even the Moscow Art Theatre, and to the so-called “little theatres” in the
United States from the teens and twenties, such as the Washington Square
Players, Provincetown Players, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and Civic
Repertory Theatre, to the Group Theatre and the Federal Theatre Project in
the thirties. In most cases the founders of these companies were discontented
with the aesthetics of the mainstream and wished to explore and develop
foreign plays, new approaches to American playwriting, and even new styles
of acting in the less restrictive contexts of experimental theatres, which invariably had more intimate physical surroundings, fewer formal demands on production, and far less economic risk. Still, while the participants in these
ventures saw themselves as challenging accepted practices and mainstream
preconceptions, they rarely saw themselves as oppositional outsiders. In
most cases the alternative became absorbed into the mainstream. The
Washington Square Players, for example, became the Theatre Guild, which
became a major producing organization on Broadway; Eugene O’Neill, first
produced by the Provincetown Players, did not remain on the fringes for long;
and the Group Theatre of the thirties produced the actors and directors of
both Hollywood and New York for the forties and fifties. (See Volume 2,
Chapter 4 for more discussion of the groups mentioned above.)
In the late forties it seemed as if history would repeat itself as an alternative theatre emerged once again. This time, however, most of the members of
this new Off-Broadway movement were not rebelling so much against the aesthetics of Broadway as against the restrictive nature of its economically
driven production structure. In a world of diminished opportunities and economic high risk, serious drama, experimental theatre, and unknown and
untried playwrights found little welcome in the mainstream. Off-Broadway
arose to take up the slack. But instead of being absorbed into the mainstream
after a decade or so as its predecessor movements had been, Off- Broadway
became a shadow Broadway, as it were – a movement that ultimately replaced
Broadway’s function as a producer of serious drama. The result therefore was
not so much an alteration of Broadway aesthetics as a permanent shift in the
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production landscape and geography of New York theatre. (See Gussow,
Chapter 2, “Off- and Off-Off Broadway.”)
The population of theatre practitioners in the late forties was being fed by
servicemen returning from the war, and a new phenomenon: graduates of
college-based theatre training programs. Though still a limited factor in the
forties, the college and university theatre that had begun in the first decades
of the century with courses at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and the Carnegie
Institute of Technology (now Carnegie–Mellon), grew at astounding rates in
the postwar years. By the nineties there were over 1,500 full-fledged theatre
departments, and over 2,500 colleges and universities offering courses and
mounting productions. Some of the most elaborate physical structures at
many colleges and universities are state-of-the-art theatres housing lavish
productions of a wide range of classics, modern, and original plays; in some
communities they provide the only live theatre. But the professional theatres
cannot absorb the great numbers of students coming out of the academic
training programs, even the relatively small percentage who are well-trained
and talented, so the vast majority of university-trained theatre artists wind up
teaching in the academic theatre, which, therefore, becomes a self-perpetuating training ground. Commentators on the state of the arts in the United
States sometimes bemoan the paucity of theatres per capita and the low percentage of theatregoing within the general population in comparison to most
other developed countries. But if one adds the academic theatres to the total,
then there may be more theatrical production in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Yet the rift between academic and professional
theatre in many instances is great and the crossover from one to the other is
minimal.
Since Broadway could no longer absorb these newcomers as it once might
have, Off-Broadway became a home for young artists seeking a means of entry
into the mainstream. For many, Off-Broadway was a way station, a place to
become known before moving on to Broadway or, increasingly, on to
Hollywood.
Two theatres that had been active Off-Broadway spaces since the twenties,
the Cherry Lane and the Provincetown, along with some recital halls and nontraditional spaces, became home for the new Off-Broadway movement, and
by 1949 seven groups were operating on a regular basis. In the face of pressure from Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional actors, five
companies banded together to form the Off-Broadway Theatre League, which
negotiated a contract with Equity. Off-Broadway theatres were limited by this
contract to no more than 300 seats (there were separate contracts for 200-to299-seat houses and those 199 and less), and outside the area bounded by
Fifth and Ninth Avenues on the east and west, and Thirty-fourth and Fifty-sixth
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Streets on the south and north. Although a 1972 history of Off-Broadway could
describe it as “a state of mind, a set of production conditions, a way of looking
at theater at every point at odds with Broadway’s patterns” (Little, OffBroadway, 13–14), it was really none of those things. Off-Broadway was a
contractual and economic institution. Theodore Mann, a co-founder of the
Circle in the Square, said, “We had no great standards, no great ideas. We
simply loved the stage and we wanted a place where we could work.” Director
José Quintero, another founder, said simply, “The main difference between
Broadway and Off-Broadway is economical” (Mann and Quintero quoted in
Poggi, Theater in America, 173–74).
The Circle in the Square, founded by Quintero and Mann in a defunct nightclub in Greenwich Village, opened in 1951 with Dark of the Moon. The innovative thrust stage – a long narrow stage surrounded on three sides by the
audience – was not a factor of scenographic choice but of necessity; the producers had to work with the existing space. Yet it established Off-Broadway
as a place for alternative approaches to stagecraft. In 1952, Quintero directed
a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke that had failed in its
initial Broadway run in 1948. It became a huge success downtown and established Quintero’s reputation as a director, made a star of Geraldine Page, and
launched the Circle in the Square as the paradigm of the Off-Broadway
theatre. Other similar groups followed. The repertoire was comprised largely
of those shows overlooked or mishandled by Broadway, including plays of
Williams and O’Neill, and the more recent wave of European authors such as
Genet, Sartre, and Beckett. Broadway, especially a Broadway geared toward
light entertainment and hit shows and the largest possible audience within a
shrinking pool, was ill-equipped to tackle the darker, more intimate, structurally and stylistically more complex plays emerging in the postwar era. The
fact that movies and television had usurped the psychological drama for
themselves altered spectator perceptions; audiences had become accustomed to a certain intimacy in this genre – the facial closeup cannot be duplicated in a 1,000- or 1,500-seat theatre. The intimate surroundings of an
Off-Broadway theatre proved ideal for the psychological and emotional intensity of many of the plays. Whatever factors had contributed to the failure of
Summer and Smoke on Broadway, it was clear that the unique spatial arrangement of the Circle in the Square contributed significantly to its Off-Broadway
success.
But the Off-Broadway plays were not fundamentally different from what
had been produced on Broadway in previous generations and it quickly
became economically and structurally like Broadway – a place for the production of individual shows with artistic personnel hired by a producer on a per
show basis, that would run as long as there were ticket-buying patrons. The
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cheaper costs (in part because of lower rents and freedom from union stage
crews) and the more exotic surroundings were all that separated it from
Broadway. By way of comparison, the average cost for mounting a straight
play Off-Broadway in 1965 was $15,000 to $20,000. On Broadway the cost was
approximately $100,000 to $110,000. Weekly operating costs for the same
period averaged $2,500 for Off-Broadway and $20,000 for Broadway. An OffBroadway musical cost in the neighborhood of $40,000, while the Broadway
equivalent was $500,000. By the late nineties a Broadway musical spectacle
could cost anywhere from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000, requiring multiple producers and corporate sponsorship.
Nonetheless, the audiences and artists coming of age in the postwar era
saw in the revivals, classics, European plays, and new works of Off-Broadway
a challenge to the increasingly banal world of the Broadway stage. The fact
that “serious art” was now presented predominantly in one class of theatres,
while entertainment was reserved for another, began a precipitous slide
toward the ghettoization of theatre. Instead of a more or less homogeneous
audience, there were increasingly separate constituencies; a two-tiered
system of art had emerged in which each side saw the other as irrelevant and
a threat to societal sensibilities. By the seventies this rift had multiplied into
a variety of discrete, often mutually exclusive types of theatres frequently
based on identity politics. There were theatres for African Americans, gays,
Latinos, women, and numerous others, and even these groups were subdivided into varying political and social points of view. (See Carlson, Chapter 2,
“Alternative Theatre”.) The audience for one theatre generally did not attend
the others, and they often openly despised and berated the mainstream and
occasionally each other, as demonstrated in this 1968 statement by Teatro
Campesino founder Luis Valdez. Noting that the world of mainstream theatre
had nothing to do with his life or the society he knew, he proclaimed: “Who
responds to Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller picking his liver apart? You
can’t respond to that shit” (quoted in Schevill, Break Out!, 12). Much of the
function of prewar Broadway, that is, the production of new dramas and classical revivals for a largely white, middle-class audience, moved to the resident
professional theatres around the country until, by the nineties, the so-called
regional theatres had largely supplanted the older theatrical institution of
“the Road.” Broadway became a place for splashy musicals, theatrical
“events,” and a few dramas that had first proved themselves outside New
York. New drama was virtually confined to Off-Broadway.
Despite the long-range implications, there was a vitality to the OffBroadway theatre of the fifties and early sixties. The number of new productions peaked in 1961–62 at 125 plus 20 holdovers from the previous season.
When added to the 73 productions that played on Broadway that year (53 new
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and 20 continuing) plus the beginnings of Off-Off Broadway, the figures begin
to rival the best years of the twenties. But they did so under significantly different circumstances. Except for Broadway, of course, these were not productions playing in 1,000-seat theatres for long runs; the majority were
productions in small venues playing to audiences of 299 or fewer for a limited
time. (In fairness, it should be noted that the majority of the 264 productions
that opened in the 1927–28 season closed after brief runs, though with less
serious financial implications than today.) Commenting in early 1998 on the
inability of much drama to attract a sustainable audience, playwright and
librettist Peter Stone suggested, somewhat facetiously, that “there is no shortage of good plays; what Broadway is suffering from is a shortage of good audiences.”3 From a statistical point of view this is essentially true. The total
number of new productions in New York – considering all venues – has not significantly changed since World War I; but the audience has shrunk greatly.
Disaffection and Loss
In the years after World War II, American drama seemed to become totally preoccupied with the individual’s struggle against society, often played out in the
microcosm of some domestic or familial setting. Through the fifties, the most
remarkable playwright of personal angst continued to be Tennessee Williams.
His characters were the outcasts of society, possessed by some internal
demons, and searching for human contact and understanding. And while the
locale and provenance of these characters were often exotic (frequently the
gothic South), the inner spirituality of the characters nonetheless appealed to
Broadway audiences of the time. But the playwright who best succeeded in
melding poetic realism with gritty American naturalism was William Inge,
whose four major works, Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, and The
Dark at the Top of the Stairs, virtually spanned the fifties. As New York Times
theatre critic Brooks Atkinson described Inge’s plays, they were “dramas
about the private dilemmas of obscure people” (Broadway, 434).
Significantly, Inge set his plays in the small towns and waysides of middle
America. Although theatre is a decidedly urban activity – both its creation and
production are inextricably intertwined with the energetic creative ferment of
the city, and its success as a commercial operation depends upon a critical
mass of sophisticated theatregoers – playwrights in the postwar era looked
to rural and middle America much as Rousseau looked to the exotic new
world. In this land, away from the corrupting influence and inhumanity of the
cities, could be found either a lost innocence from the American past or
the fragile remnants of a simpler world that was in danger of disappearing.
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The St. Louis of The Glass Menagerie was a decaying industrial city seen
through the fire escapes of an alley. New Orleans, the site of Williams’s next
play, A Streetcar Named Desire, is the least American of all US cities, made even
more ethereal in Williams’s vision. His subsequent plays through the fifties
were set in the rural South or in fantastic, theatrical landscapes. Even though
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the most classic play of this genre, was
set in Brooklyn, there is a literal dialectic between the pastoral environs of the
house as seen in Willy Loman’s memories and the intrusion of high-rise apartments symbolizing the faceless urban milieu. Willy Loman became a symbol
of the forgotten little man who is a victim of the materialism of the society as
well as a victim of his own personal mistakes and agonies. A barely suppressed sexuality seethed just beneath the surface in these plays – it was significant that Marilyn Monroe played in the movie version of Bus Stop – that
was both a harbinger of and a catalyst for the sexual revolution of the next
decade. Because many of these plays became successful movies the ideas
spread well beyond Broadway.
Ironically, in the aftermath of victory in which the United States emerged
as the richest and most powerful nation in history, there was an apparent
sense of emptiness and loss gnawing at the hearts of these playwrights. The
United States experienced none of the physical destruction of Europe and
Asia, and the human loss, though significant, paled in comparison to that suffered by the other participants. What the playwrights experienced instead
was a loss of an American sensibility and mythos. Characters in these plays
seemed confused in an increasingly baffling world in which the rules, mores,
and even material objects were no longer comprehensible or negotiable.
The ideas of Existentialism and in particular the writings of Albert Camus
were not yet available in English when Williams began writing – he was mirroring an unnamed sense of disaffection in the society – but as Camus’s work
became known (The Stranger was published in English in 1946, The Plague in
1948, though two significant essays, The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus were
not available in English until 1953 and 1955, respectively) they became touchstones for a generation coming of age and seeking direction in the postwar
years. And if the philosophical implications were not always fully understood,
the sense of the meaninglessness of the universe and the consequent alienation of the individual certainly sunk in. While Existential philosophy informed
the development of Absurdist drama in France and elsewhere in Europe,
Americans grasped onto the superficial form and style of alienation and recreated the Existential hero in the Hollywood image, first with Marlon Brando in
The Wild One (1953) and then James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (1955).
In The Wild One, Brando and his motorcycle gang swarm over the countryside, descending upon and terrorizing a small town. It is the nightmare version
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of Our Town: idyllic tranquility is shattered not by the rhythms of life and
death but by random and meaningless acts of “an ugly, debauched and frightening . . . element of modern youth.” 4 When asked by a local teenage girl what
he is rebelling against, Brando snarls back the classic answer, “Whadda ya
got?” Enshrined as a poster, the representation of a black-leather-clad Brando
sneering from his Harley became a classic image of the fifties. The mantle of
alienated youth was then assumed by James Dean, who with the collar up on
his leather jacket and slicked-back hair created the “look” for a generation of
rebellious teenagers in the aptly titled Rebel without a Cause. Future cultural
icons from Bob Dylan to Jean-Paul Belmondo imitated the Dean look and style.
Unlike Brando’s character, who is an outsider, the characters of this film are
part of the affluent society – it is set in wealthy suburban Los Angeles, all the
teens have cars, and material wealth is everywhere. Dean plays a rebel against
parental and societal authority, though for no clearly articulated reason. It
would be a mistake to read too deeply into the film by Nicholas Ray – societal
power ultimately kills the outcast (Sal Mineo) and Dean seemingly welcomes
the re-establishment of paternal authority in the household. Dean’s death in
a high-speed auto accident three weeks before the release of the film helped
escalate him to cult status and secure his mythological place. It seemed all of
a piece: rebellion for rebellion’s sake, rejection of authority, and living fast
were established as ideals for a younger generation seeking identity and
purpose. Most significantly, this was achieved through image and form –
content was secondary if it existed at all.
The other significant factor, of course, was that a generational identity and
credo were being created on the screen. While the actors had theatrical training and sometimes, as with Brando, theatrical experience, the theatre was
neither the source nor the locus for this sullen exploration of disaffection,
although the attitude pervaded much of the serious drama of the fifties.
Along with the slouched stance, the hooded eyes, and the upper lip curled
into a sneer, the youthful image of disaffection was also identified with a
slurred and mumbling style of speech. First popularized by Brando, it became
associated with The Actors Studio approach. It was in stark opposition to
proper stage diction but it was also in opposition to the proscriptions of
proper societal behavior. To speak badly was to defy authority – parents,
teachers, etiquette arbiters. It also suggested a distrust of eloquence; leaders
on both sides of World War II after all had been compelling, even mesmerizing
orators. But monosyllabic inarticulateness was merely a surface manifestation of a decades-long dramatic development. Characters were losing control
of language; language as a means of communication evaporated and characters were increasingly unable to express ideas effectively or to talk to each
other in meaningful ways. Characters in these plays became trapped in
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semantics, in situations in which the language itself seemed more important
than the ideas it conveyed, or the words took on a life independent of the
objects they represented. The erosion of language as a means of communication can be traced to the avant-garde movements in Europe at the turn of the
century and most notably to the Dadaists, who divorced words from their referents and objects from meaning. This sense of language as a game reached a
peak in the Absurdist movement in the fifties, particularly in the plays of
Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a
logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous
elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring fullblown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had
become new myth-making machines.
This breakdown of language was already implicit in Death of a Salesman
and some of Williams’s plays; it became explicit in the plays of Edward Albee.
Albee burst onto the scene in 1960 with Off-Broadway productions of four oneact plays, The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, and An
American Dream. The latter two in particular seemed to be directly influenced
by the French Absurdists with their archetypal characters, symbolic plots,
and eerily simplistic language. While Albee denied any knowledge of, let alone
influence from the movement at the time of writing them, and attacked those
who attempted to pigeonhole his style of writing, he clearly had an appreciation for the work of Genet, Beckett, and Ionesco, as evidenced in a 1962 essay
in the New York Times Magazine. In a wry stab at his critics he remarked that
he had always assumed that the appellation “absurdist theatre” referred to
Broadway where “a ‘good’ play is one that makes money; a ‘bad’ play . . . is
one which does not” (“Which Theatre is the Absurd One?,” 146). His one-acts
were followed two years later with the landmark Broadway production of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a devastating critique of the American family
and, by implication, American society. In a long, emotionally brutal night the
protagonists George and Martha verbally attack and destroy each other and
their two guests while shattering the illusions that have allowed them to function for two decades. In the best of Albee’s plays there is a sense of anger and
alienation as he meticulously dissects and skewers societal institutions, especially marriage and the family. The dominant, though not always triumphant,
characters are ones who possess the greatest command of language, not
unlike characters in a Restoration comedy of manners. In Zoo Story, the character Jerry literally commandeers the stage with an assault of language.
Martha, in Virginia Woolf, bursts upon the stage with a Bette Davis quote
which leads to a long night’s journey of etymological gamesmanship and the
revelation of a child who exists only as a verbal construct. The losers in such
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games, such as Nick and Honey in Virginia Woolf, are those for whom language
is literal and pedestrian and who cannot fathom the subtexts of speech or the
illusions that language can create.
American Absurdism reached its peak in Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad,
Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, that had its New York
premiere in 1962, the same year as Virginia Woolf. The same dysfunctional
familial relations and damaged psyches explored by Williams and Inge with a
kind of poetic reverence are presented to the world in this play as something
so bizarre and grotesque they can only be laughed at. With Kopit’s play,
postwar alienation crossed a line into a territory that announced a kind of
emotional disengagement and an unwillingness or inability to come to terms
with such deep-seated trauma.
The Beats, Avant-Garde, and Rock’n’Roll
Perhaps the deepest embodiment of the spirit of disaffection and one of the
strongest forces in the shaping of an American aesthetic for the fifties were
the Beat writers. Best known today for Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and Jack
Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), the Beat poets and novelists transformed language into a musical force that in its very rhythms and structures were an
attack upon the mainstream culture of the period. Turning to the everyday –
often the gritty and vulgar – for their subject matter, they moved art, literature, and theatre out of cultural institutions and into the locales of real life. Of
great importance for the theatre was the emphasis on the performative. Their
poetry was meant to be read aloud and the use of body and voice in delivery
was as significant as the words themselves. Anticipating the performance
artists of the seventies and eighties, the Beats saw all aspects of life as a kind
of theatre, and the routines of daily life melded with the creation and performance of their art. Their use of bars, coffeehouses, church basements, and
apartments as galleries, recital halls, and performance spaces paved the way
for the venues of Off- and Off-Off Broadway. Their willingness to abandon conventional dramatic structure and their demonstration of the potential power
of the raw language of the post-Atomic age provided a way for a new generation of playwrights and theatre artists to re-envision theatre.
The Beats trace their origin to the early forties when William Burroughs,
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others met at Columbia University. The
term itself was picked up from Times Square hustler Herbert Huncke, though
its interpretation varied from artist to artist and evolved over time.
Sometimes called American Existentialists, the Beats associated themselves
with the new jazz of Charlie Parker, the action painting of Jackson Pollock, and
even the acting of Marlon Brando. In all cases the creative process tended to
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take precedent over the final product, which was devoid of conventional
structures. The closer the product was to life (and the further from the
accepted conventions of art) the better. Their life style was inseparable from
their writing and they rejected not only the strictures of artistic convention
but the constrictions of polite society. They reveled in the low-life, living in
peripheral neighborhoods, frequenting seedy bars, rejecting material possessions, hitch-hiking across the country, and descending in many cases into
alcoholism and drug addiction. But though they preceded the causeless
rebels and seemed to possess some of the gratuitous spirit of disaffection,
they were actually committed to the creation of a more humane world. Their
writings were rarely political in the sense of agit props, but they bemoaned
the suburban, materialist society and the threat of nuclear holocaust.
Ginsberg, looking back on the era from the vantage of the nineties, catalogued
the effects and influences of the Beats:
Spiritual liberation, sexual “revolution” or “liberation” . . . / Liberation of the
word from censorship . . . / The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and
roll as a high art form . . . / The spread of ecological consciousness . . . /
Opposition to the military-industrial machine . . . / Return to an appreciation
of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation. / Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures.5
The liberation of the word had a double meaning. On the one hand it meant
freeing language so that no word could be censored. So-called “dirty” words
were as usable – and “beautiful” – to the Beats in poetry and prose as those
allowed in polite conversation. This transformation of language had an effect
on the “Free Speech” movement that erupted at the University of California at
Berkeley in 1964, which in turn led to a redefinition of what could be said on
the stage, in films, and on television, and what could be printed in newspapers
and magazines. Though the works of the Beats themselves were the subject
of censorship, their attacks upon the restrictions of language and subject
matter were a factor in the Supreme Court battles over the American publications of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, and the novels of Henry Miller.
Everything from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Hair to “Saturday Night
Live” to Angels in America was indebted in some degree to the Beats. The liberation of language also meant a freeing from the rules of grammar and usage.
Some Beat poetry took the form of concrete poetry whose meaning was
bound up in its graphic form on the page, but it also took the form of performance – poetry whose meaning was complete only in live readings that often
expanded into theatrical performances. Poet Diane DiPrima and her husband
Alan Marlowe created the New York Poets Theatre that produced works by
several leading poets. Some of the writers of this period – Frank O’Hara,
Kenneth Koch, Jackson MacLow, for example – turned out a small body of dramatic work (and Koch continues to write plays). The onomatopoeic and
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rhythmic language and the often whimsical or bizarre imagery of many of
these works limited their appeal, although there were some minor Off- and OffOff Broadway successes, the most notable being Michael McClure’s The Beard
(1967). This play, which was first performed in San Francisco, achieved notoriety not for its poetry but for its then scandalous outpouring of expletives
and the simulated act of cunnilingus. Somewhat like the nineteenth-century
Romantic poets who also wrote plays, the drama of the Beat poets remained
poetry even though encased in a dramatic structure.
Many of the same forces and ideas that served as foundation for the Beats
also led to the development of a true avant-garde theatre in the United States.
The term avant-garde has often been applied colloquially to anything new or
unusual, but in theatre it more accurately reflects a genre that energetically
rejects what theorist Michael Kirby called an “information structure,”6 that is
a work of art in which logical bits of information are sequentially presented to
an audience and the understanding of the work depends upon the accumulation and decoding of this information. Typically this involves narrative
(Aristotle’s privileging of plot), and such elements as theme and character
bolstered by the performative components of theatre such as set design,
costume, props, sound, et cetera. Such a structure requires of the audience
Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” because it establishes a substitutional world on the stage that exists separately from the world of the spectator. Whether as a result of the war or the ever present threat of nuclear
annihilation, many artists were pushed to extremes and created innovative
and original work. Only the Dada and Futurist painters and poets earlier in the
century had so completely and so successfully broken out of classical and
conventional forms and structures. Form and object, cause and effect were
sundered; Aristotelian structure was abandoned. Allan Kaprow summed up
the innovations of “action painting” in his posthumous appreciation of
Jackson Pollock, but it applies equally to experiments in theatre:
Form. In order to follow it, it is necessary to get rid of the usual idea of
“Form,” i.e. a beginning, middle and end, or any variant of this principle –
such as fragmentation. You do not enter a painting of Pollock’s in any one
place (or hundred places). Anywhere is everywhere and you can dip in and
out when and where you can. This has led to remarks that his art gives one
the impression of going on forever – a true insight. It indicates that the
confines of the rectangular field were ignored in lieu of an experience of a
continuum going in all directions simultaneously, beyond the literal dimensions of any work. (“The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” 26)
The narrative structure and psychologically based characters that had
dominated virtually all Western theatre would be abandoned in favor of a
theatre of sound, movement, form, and object that could be seen, on various
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levels, as an extension of the everyday world, in which – to quote Kaprow on
Pollock once more – “the artist, the spectator and the outer world are . . . interchangeably involved” (26). Decorum in language and diction was also abandoned and what Allen Ginsberg called the “vernacular, idiomatic, rhythmic . . .
cadences of actual talk . . . the actual spontaneous mind of the moment,”7
began to replace the carefully crafted dialogue of stage speech. This technique borrowed from jazz and opened the door for non-speech sounds and
music-like speech within stage performance.
The avant-garde entered the world of theatre through the world of art
and music. Composer John Cage, through his study of Zen Buddhism, became
fascinated with chance and indeterminacy as methods of composition and
performance. In this way, Cage could not impose a particular aesthetic viewpoint in composing music – he would not choose a note simply because he
liked the sound of it. Cage also believed that an individual sound was neither
musical nor non-musical; thus, anything that produced sound was music, and
since there was no such thing as absolute silence (even in an anechoic
chamber, he discovered, you could hear the sounds of your own body, such
as the hum of the nervous system or the coursing of blood), music was potentially everywhere. Cage felt his function as a composer was to create structures whereby a listener could hear sounds in a new way. Not surprisingly,
Cage’s compositions were seldom “popular,” but the impact of his ideas on
the performing arts was profound. On the one hand, they led to the removal
of barriers among the different art forms, such as theatre, dance, and music
(barriers that were largely peculiar to Western performance), and on the
other they provided alternative structures for composition in a range of performing and plastic arts that removed them from Aristotelian or narrative or
informational constructs.
1952 might serve as a reasonable date for the emergence of an American
avant-garde theatre. In that year, at the experimental Black Mountain College
in North Carolina, John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and painter
Robert Rauschenberg created “Theatre Piece,” a performance that involved a
series of discrete actions selected by chance methods and performed interdeterminately by the performers within a given time structure. It was music,
dance, poetry, and theatre all at once, though unlike any of these genres in any
conventional sense. Many see it as the prototype of the Happening. In 1956
Cage taught a course in composition at the New School for Social Research in
New York, a class taken by Allan Kaprow and several artists who would be
instrumental in the development of Happenings and other forms of avantgarde theatre.
18 Happenings in 6 Parts emerged from Kaprow’s interests in environmental sculpture, action painting, collage, and performance. The performance
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took place in the Reuben Gallery, an art gallery on Fourth Avenue. Within the
space three contiguous rooms had been constructed of translucent plastic.
Folding chairs were arranged in differing configurations in each room, and the
space was illuminated by rows of red and white bulbs. There were other
objects and decorative elements within the spaces. Spectators were given
cards which instructed them to move to different spaces at the sound of a bell
signaling the end of each part. The performance consisted of sounds, lights,
and various actions by six performers. There was no apparent logic or
meaning behind the sounds, images, and activities; the performers did not
assume “characters” in the standard theatrical sense; and there was no discernible plot. Yet despite the name “Happening,” which Kaprow came to
regret because of its implications of spontaneity and frivolousness, this event
was carefully rehearsed and highly structured, yet enigmatic. Though
Happenings were a short-lived phenomenon, they had the effect of stripping
away all preconceptions of Western drama, crossing boundaries among
theatre, plastic arts, music, and dance, and creating a performance based on
formal structures rather than narrative information.
In his landmark book Happenings, Michael Kirby traced the historical roots
of Happenings and came up with the most complete and useful definition of
the form: “a purposefully composed form of theatre in which diverse alogical
elements, including non-matrixed performing, are organized in a compartmented structure” (22). Kirby defined “non-matrixed” performances as those
that are not contextualized by fictive elements such as place, time, or character; “compartmented structure” refers to one in which no information necessarily carries from segment to segment so that in this sense, at least, the
elements could be rearranged without loss of information. While the term
Happening grew into a popular epithet for any loosely structured and unusual
event, with suggestions of anarchy and improvisation, in its original form it
provided the roots of the formalist avant-garde in the theatre, bringing a modernist sensibility to the cultural scene and even laying the groundwork for the
postmodernism of the eighties.
The avant-garde movement in the United States is inextricably bound up
with the Living Theatre, founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina in 1948 and
whose first performance was in 1951 in the living room of their Upper West
Side apartment. While their initial theatrical endeavors were inevitably based
upon existing theatrical models, their increasing frustration with the aesthetics of mainstream American playwriting and theatrical production led them in
new directions. In a 1962 diary entry, Beck lambasted the world of commercial theatre:
I do not like the Broadway theatre because it does not know how to say hello.
The tone of voice is false, the mannerisms are false, the sex is false, ideal,
the Hollywood world of perfection, the clean image, the well pressed
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clothes, the well scrubbed anus, odorless, inhuman, of the Hollywood actor,
the Broadway star. And the terrible false dirt of Broadway, the lower depths
in which the dirt is imitated, inaccurate. (The Life of the Theatre, 7)
Even within the alternative world of Off-Broadway the Living Theatre operated on the fringes. Closer in aesthetics to the Beat poets and the Abstract
Expressionist painters than to their contemporaries in the theatre, they
sought out texts that eschewed narrative and challenged traditional dramatic
structures. In the first years their repertoire consisted of verse dramas and a
veritable who’s who of the anti-establishment European and American literary avant-garde: Paul Goodman, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca,
Bertolt Brecht, Kenneth Rexroth, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, John Ashbery, W.H.
Auden, August Strindberg, Jean Cocteau, Luigi Pirandello, William Carlos
Williams, Jack Gelber, Jackson MacLow, Ezra Pound, and Kenneth Brown. By
moving out of traditional theatre spaces – they presented one season at the
venerable Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre but then worked in lofts – they
thwarted the expectations of the audience; habitual viewing patterns were
disrupted as the conventions of theatregoing were undermined. By abandoning the slickness of commercial production they shifted the focus onto the
text through a spare and raw emotional and visual style. A new kind of realism
emerged from the use of “real” spaces and a more prosaic, pedestrian style of
acting that depended for its success on its connection with the emotions of
the spectators.
In the work of the Living Theatre, in Happenings, and ultimately in much
experimental theatre of the sixties and after, literary theatre was rejected in
favor of theatre that depended as much on production as on text and whose
meaning was complete only in the performance. The value of the Living
Theatre, furthermore, was in its position at the cross-section of the Beat literature, modern art, and the prewar European avant-garde, particularly the
ideas of Antonin Artaud. French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez had
introduced John Cage to the writings of Artaud. Cage, in turn, gave these to a
colleague at Black Mountain College, Mary Caroline Richards, who translated
The Theatre and Its Double. While working on the manuscript she sent a draft
to Malina and Beck, who saw in Artaud’s work a similar spirit to their own.
The Living Theatre’s 1959 production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection was
seen at the time as a startling breakthrough into new realms of theatre. The
play centers about the activities of a group of junkies and musicians who
await a delivery of heroin in the first act, and then get high in the second act.
Gelber framed the action by the conceit of two filmmakers documenting the
action – claiming that the characters were recruited for a documentary on the
drug culture and the jazz world. Many in the audience accepted the ruse and
saw the play not as drama but as “real” people simply placed on a stage. The
actors addressed the audience directly at times; during intermission at least
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one of the actors was panhandling in the lobby; many of the performers were,
in fact, real musicians who played a jazz score as part of the performance.
Critic Robert Brustein defined the significance of the play at the time:
Constantly tripping over the boundary between life and art, stripped of all
significant form, antagonistic to any theory or morality which does not
accord with practice, The Connection is probably not a “good” play by any
standard we now possess to judge such things; but it forms the basis for a
brilliant theatrical occasion and it lives in that pure, bright, thin air of reality
which few of our “good” playwrights have ever dared to breathe.8
Despite its innovations, however, the play was in many respects the culmination of Naturalism. Finally, here was a production so realistic that many in
the audience failed to identify it as a piece of theatre and mistook the actors
and actions as “a slice of life.” Consequently, the Living Theatre felt that it no
longer wished to pursue this direction; tricking the audience was antithetical
to its aims. Rather, theatre should make the audience confront the real world
through conscious decision-making. This would set the Living Theatre performers on a more Brechtian path toward presenting themselves not as characters but as themselves, and the theatre not as illusion but as a frank and
open theatrical event. It also meshed with their passionate commitment to
social ideas and an anarchist philosophy for political revolution. In 1964, in
the wake of convictions for violation of income tax regulations, the Living
Theatre went into a self-imposed exile in Europe, where they were greeted
with enthusiasm.
One other contributing factor to the development of the avant-garde was
the debut of the Tulane Drama Review in 1955,9 which provided the means for
the dissemination of ideas. Edited at first by Robert Corrigan, and then by
Richard Schechner, TDR, as it was known, quickly supplanted the moribund
Theatre Arts Monthly, which had been the primary source of theatre news for
over three decades. The journal became a magnet for almost all theatre practitioners and scholars searching for new approaches to theatre. In its first few
years, TDR focused primarily on new plays and theoretical ideas from Europe,
and virtually every major European playwright and theoretician of the
postwar years was first introduced to American theatre artists in its pages.
Over the years it acquainted American readers with de Ghelderode, Sartre,
Dürrenmatt, the Absurdists, Artaud, Brecht, Grotowski, Happenings, Cage,
the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and even a re-evaluation of Stanislavsky.
Under the editorship of Michael Kirby in the seventies it was a significant
force in the rediscovery of Futurism, Dadaism, Symbolism, and the Russian
avant-garde. It would ultimately champion and influence the work of Richard
Foreman, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Post-Modern Dance, the
Performance and Wooster Groups, and the early performance artists, among
others. During the peak years of avant-garde and experimental theatre, in the
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sixties and seventies, The Drama Review was virtually alone in its reportage
and analysis. By the eighties, as the avant-garde was inevitably losing much
of its initial energy, a host of new journals was spawned which focused on new
performance and performance theory. Thus, instead of one or two major journals fostering an exchange of information and ideas, there developed numerous small journals with circulations of a few hundred to a few thousand,
catering to very narrow fields of interest or points of view. The possibilities
for the cross-fertilization of ideas were, ironically, greatly diminished.
The disintegration and transformation of language also owed much to the
development of rock’n’roll (whose effects upon the theatre would begin to be
felt most strongly in the Off-Off Broadway of the mid-sixties when the generation raised on rock began to create theatre). Rock’n’roll exploded on the scene
in 1956 (the same year as Ginsberg’s Howl ). The immediate roots of the music
can be traced to the rhythm and blues of the forties, although the real roots
go back to African call and response music brought over by slaves, minstrel
songs, Irish and Scottish ballads and jigs, jazz, blues, and country and
western. The term “rock’n’roll” was supposedly coined by Cleveland disk
jockey Alan Freed in 1951, although it had been in African American slang for
much longer. Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” became the first big rock’n’roll hit in 1955, popularized by the movie The Blackboard Jungle. In that
same year, Elvis Presley topped the country and western charts, while Chuck
Berry and Fats Domino reached the top of the rhythm and blues charts. In
1956, however, the major rock’n’roll artists would cross over to dominate the
pop charts: Presley released “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” and “Love Me
Tender,” Little Richard had “Tutti Frutti” and three other top forty hits, and
Berry and Domino moved from the rhythm and blues charts to the more
broadly based pop charts as well. The appearance of Presley on the Ed
Sullivan Show in the fall of 1956 transformed American popular culture in one
evening.
Almost overnight, the arbiters of popular taste had shifted from the middleaged middle class, to rebellious white youth drawing on black-inspired music
that was raucous, raw, and pulsating with a barely concealed sexual energy.
The language of rock’n’roll was usually simplistic and, even with the the threeto three-and-a-half-minute format of most songs, repetitive. But the language
of the songs relied on nonsensical syllables, grunts, half-articulated and distorted words, and sounds that functioned more as percussion and rhythm
than as communicative vocabulary. The Brando cum Kowalski mumble had
become attached to a new music to become the emotional cry of a generation.
Rationalism became as irrelevant as a need for a specific agenda for rebellion.
While historically, nonsensical choruses could be traced back to
Aristophanes’ The Frogs and were common in popular song from medieval
madrigals to modern times, the use of rhythmic choruses in rock music were
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foregrounded and became the essence of the song. The message seemed to
be that proper language was insufficient, it was incapable of communicating
the pain, anger, heartbreak, or simple confusion of teenage angst. Any number
of rock’n’roll lyrics from the fifties could serve as an example, but it reached
a zenith of sorts with the opening lines of the 1957 “Get a Job” by the
Silhouettes:
Sha da da da
Sha da da da da
Ba do
Sha da da da
Sha da da da da
Ba do
Sha da da da
Sha da da da da
Ba do
Sha da da da
Sha da da da da
Ba do
Ba yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Mum mum mum mum mum mum
Get a job.
For a generation for whom this was both poetic and meaningful, the conventional language of traditional drama was going to be boring at best and
incomprehensible at worst.
The other significant aspect of rock’n’roll was that it created a bridge,
however tenuous and complicated, between white and black. It gave black
performers entry into a white-controlled entertainment world, opened up a
young white generation to new ideas and experiences – all the more dangerous because it was expressed through music and rhythm and therefore could
not be combated with rational dialogue.
Broadway’s only real acknowledgment of the new music at the time was in
the 1960 Bye Bye Birdie, which, despite some rock-inflected music, was a
sweet-spirited sendup of teenage mania for Elvis Presley. Structurally, it was
the standard Broadway book musical. It allowed a baffled generation to smile
condescendingly on youthful passions without realizing that the very form of
theatre it was watching was being completely undermined by the music being
parodied. The musical theatre which for generations had been the fount of
American popular music suddenly found itself on the sidelines as popular
music was created outside theatrical contexts altogether. The old pop music
was transformed into “mood music” – background sound for elevators, restaurants, and supermarkets. As critic Martin Gottfried has observed, “this
wordless sound – usually in the form of castrated Kern, Rodgers, Berlin, and
Loesser – spread like an antimusical cancer at the very time that rock’n’roll
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was becoming popular . . . The theater, forgetting it had created the vital
popular song of which the ‘mood music’ was a mockery, now became the
slave of such music” (Broadway Musicals, 287).
Technology ensured the widespread consumption of the new music. The
transistor radio was a low-cost, battery-operated radio that could fit into a
large pocket or be easily carried and which also allowed for an earphone. A
whole generation was literally plugged into “top 40 radio” as a primary source
of culture. Ironically, even the success of rock’n’roll on radio was abetted by
television. Presley’s first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show attracted the
largest television audience to date. In that pre-cable era, when there were only
three networks, television still had the ability to set national tastes. Nowhere
was this more true than with Sullivan’s show, which was essentially a nationally broadcast vaudeville show with a weekly display of everything from classical ballet to pie-plate jugglers. Presley’s appearance established the power
of television as a mass marketing tool for the rock’n’roll era. Thereafter, every
new band needed an appearance on Ed Sullivan for validation. Although
Sullivan regularly presented excerpts from Broadway musicals on the show
(Rodgers and Hammerstein were guests on the very first broadcast), which
could boost ticket sales or guarantee an audience for a soon-to-be-launched
road tour, the impact paled in comparison to the hundreds of thousands, even
millions of record sales generated by a rock star’s appearance. Teenagers with
disposable cash in the most prosperous decade of American history became
the new consumers of popular culture. The baby-boom generation rejected
the music and lyrics of a dying Broadway musical theatre for rock’n’roll. (It is
telling that the cast album of Hello, Dolly! was knocked out of the number one
spot in 1964 by the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night.) Those with a talent for
musical composition who might have gone into theatre in previous generations now turned to the new music. Rock’n’roll was loud, raucous, direct,
energetic. It spoke directly to the desires, longings, hidden fears, and curiosities of the younger generation. It was fast and it came in three-minute segments and even within this limited framework the songs were often able to tell
stories – minidramas – from the defeat of the British in the War of 1812 to
James Dean-like car crashes. Rock was accessible and it was everywhere. Who
needed theatre?
Mainstream Response
While the musical went through an auspicious two decades following the war,
producing such landmarks as South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, Gypsy,
Candide, West Side Story, The Most Happy Fella, Fiddler on the Roof, and the OffBroadway revival of the Brecht–Weill Threepenny Opera, among many others,
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it would suffer even more severely from the upheavals that beset Broadway.
Musicals took a three-pronged hit during this period. Most profound, of
course, was the devastating effect of rock’n’roll and the concomitant radical
restructuring of the recording industry that altered the way in which popular
songs were generated and marketed. Second, the fortunes of the musical,
more so than the drama, were tied to the producing structure of commercial
theatre, so that the shifting economics of Broadway had a potent impact. The
complexities of bringing together the book, the lyrics, and the music – often
the work of three separate creators – the usual components of choreography
and orchestration, and the generally more elaborate visual demands of musicals, require financial, technical, and production support well in excess of
most straight plays. Finally, the musical, like the drama, was faced with a structural dilemma in response to changing aesthetics and sensibilities.
Like the drama of the interwar years, the musical had thrived on a narrative structure in which a collection of songs was carefully interwoven within
the structure of a story (the “book”). These musicals were basically plays with
songs and dances, except that no matter how compelling, the book worked
only insofar as it meshed with the music; it could never work as a play on its
own. The central role of the songs meant that the success of these shows was
often tied to particular performers who could “sell” the songs to the public.
Most notable among these, of course, was Ethel Merman, who is, years after
her death, still inextricably linked with many of the greatest songs of the
American musical theatre. The very nature of the musical involves a shifting
of emotion into the medium of song and music; complex dialogue and intricate plotting are anathema to the musical theatre genre.
But the narrative structure was as inadequate for the postwar musical as
for the drama. The same forces that contributed to new movements in poetry,
dance, and jazz also moved the musical toward the thematically conceived
and choreographically driven concept musical with its greater emphasis on
complex ideas, darker emotions, and an effect achieved completely only in
the process of performance. The dark and disturbing themes of Pal Joey and
Lady in the Dark were early harbingers of the new form while the episodic
structure of Kurt Weill’s and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life (1948) was a self-conscious move away from the traditional narrative structure. These works
paved the way for the successful 1954 revival of The Threepenny Opera, and
in a sense allowed for the disturbing subtext of Gypsy (1959), which packed a
psychological and emotional punch that seemed more appropriate for the
world of Tennessee Williams.
The new form would be brought to fruition by Leonard Bernstein.
Bernstein, like Weill and George Gershwin before him, succeeded in blending
pop music with classical structures; he was strongly influenced by Igor
Stravinsky and Aaron Copland in both his classical and Broadway composi-
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tions. Choreographed by Jerome Robbins, Bernstein’s first musical, On the
Town (1944), was propelled not by the book or even the songs, but by a thorough musical score and sophisticated and athletic ballet and modern dance
which supplanted lyrics and dialogue as a means of story-telling and emotional conveyance. Bernstein’s revolutionary West Side Story (1957) transformed the emotional energy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into complex
rhythms and counterpoint in one of the most musically sophisticated scores
ever to grace Broadway, while the tensions and energies of the show were
brought to life in Robbins’s stunningly balletic choreography. West Side Story
marked the end of an era on Broadway – the book musical as a vital form was
virtually dead within a decade.
With the exception of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the next generation of musical theatre stars were not the composers or singers, but the
choreographers and directors – Bob Fosse (who, like Robbins, had been
trained by Broadway director George Abbott), Michael Bennett, and Harold
Prince. In the musicals developed by these choreographers and directors,
which included Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Pippin, Chicago, Follies, Company,
A Chorus Line, and Dreamgirls, the emphasis was increasingly on staging and
choreography over music and lyrics. These productions, especially those of
Harold Prince, also revitalized American design. From the mid-sixties to the
mid-seventies Prince worked with the Russian-born Boris Aronson. Though
always highly regarded among his colleagues as one of the finest designers of
the time, he had only moderate successes until he teamed up with Prince and
Robbins on Fiddler on the Roof (1964) with its Marc Chagall-inspired sets.
Thereafter, his designs for Prince’s productions blended Constructivist elements with contemporary technology and the occasional touch of American
sentiment to create some of the most stunning designs of the era. After
Aronson’s death in 1980, Prince found another soulmate in Eugene Lee. (See
Chapters 2 [Maslon, “Broadway”] and 4 for more detailed analysis of musical
theatre.)
As Broadway declined there was a significant growth of theatre outside
New York City. Although there had long been local professional theatres, stock
companies, and touring shows, New York’s position as the originator and focal
point of theatre and entertainment was clear and dominant. Ultimately, a play
or actor that did not perform in New York lacked credibility. As if the relationship were not clear enough, during the interwar years Theatre Arts Monthly
had a regular feature entitled “The Tributary Theatre,” which was a roundup
of theatrical activity outside New York City. Some of the prewar theatres such
as the Goodman Theatre of Chicago, the Cleveland Play House, and The
Karamu Theatre of Cleveland continued to produce in the postwar years, but
a new crop of theatres also emerged. Beginning with Margo Jones’s theatre-inthe-round in Dallas known as Theatre ’47 (then Theatre ’48, and so on), others
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soon followed, notably the Alley Theatre in Houston, the Arena Stage in
Washington, D.C., and the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. The most important
factor in this development was a study by the Ford Foundation in 1957 that
led to funding of what became known as resident professional theatres. The
Rockefeller Foundation also began to support such theatres, and finally, the
creation of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 led to more support.
As a result there was an explosion of new theatres around the country presenting original productions. (See Chapter 2 [LoMonaco, “Regional/Resident
Theatre”] for an expanded coverage of regional theatre.)
These theatres employed thousands of theatre professionals and created
venues for classics, revivals, and, especially, new plays that the New York
theatre could no longer produce or originate. With the virtual elimination of
the “Road,” the resident professional theatres allowed a broad spectrum of
the population to see live theatre. Several of the early theatres were founded
and run by women, suggesting that the regional theatres provided opportunities that might have been denied to many in New York.
After half a century, however, despite developing many new plays, actors,
directors, and designers, it is not clear that the regional theatre movement
has advanced the American theatre significantly. Virtually all these theatres
are not-for-profit and, having been founded with subsidies, they remain
dependent on subsidies. When the theatres were run by visionary directors,
the lack of dependence on the box office sometimes allowed for daring and
innovative productions. But as support from foundations, federal and state
agencies, and private donors diminished, and as production costs rose, and
as the first generation of visionary artists died or retired, the resident theatres became increasingly conservative, producing cookie-cutter theatre they
hoped would appeal, or at least be inoffensive to a conservative subscriptionbased audience. With a few notable exceptions, these “regional” theatres had
nothing to do with their location; they rarely produced plays of local interest;
they employed few local artists; most still had one eye on New York City. And
in a development since the eighties, the best theatres moved their successful
productions to Broadway. Notable examples include La Jolla Playhouse’s productions of the musicals Big River and Tommy, the plays of August Wilson first
produced by the Yale Repertory Theatre, and Angels in America developed by
the Mark Taper Forum. The out-of-town tryout which used to be Broadway’s
primary development tool was largely supplanted by the out-of-town creation. Plays were created and developed in a resident theatre and then brought
to New York. If successful, the originating theatre would reap financial
rewards, while the Broadway producer was spared at least part of the high
cost of developing a risky property. Depending on one’s point of view, this was
either the decentralization and democratization of the American theatre, or it
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was a further refinement of the tributary theatre with all streams still flowing
into the great reservoir of New York City.
In one regard, though, some of the regional theatres – the American
Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, the Hartford Stage Company, the Arena, the
Guthrie, La Jolla, American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and the
Mark Taper, as well as the New York Shakespeare Festival under the late
Joseph Papp – provided an opportunity that commercial theatre did not. They
allowed the more daring contemporary directors, including Andrei Serban,
Robert Woodruff, Liviu Ciulei, Mark Lamos, Marcus Stern, François Rochaix,
Anne Bogart, JoAnne Akalaitis, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman, to direct
innovative productions of classics. Texts were re-examined, deconstructed,
and abstracted in order to find contemporary resonances through theatrical
means beyond the mere updating of sets and costumes. Meanwhile, many
designers who worked internationally or were aware of international developments expanded the visual component of this development. These included
John Conklin, Santo Loquasto, Eugene Lee, Michael Yeargan, Robert Israel,
and George Tsypin.
Social Upheavals
One wonders what might have happened (or more accurately, not happened)
had the country continued on the superficially benign course and prosperity
of the Eisenhower years. But the near nuclear war caused by the Cuban
missile crisis followed by the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963
scarred the nation in ways that were not readily apparent for years by undermining a sense of stability and security and challenging the overall belief
structure of the country. The rapidly increasing involvement in Vietnam, just
at the point that the baby-boom generation was coming of draft age, divided
the country along not only political but generational and class lines. For many
of the younger generation the conflict was not a clear-cut “good war” but
rather a war that seemed to be controlled by political factors and suspect
ideology. Faith in government and political leadership was thus subverted
and part of the mortar that held society together seemed to crumble.
The issue of race has always been the Achilles’ heel of American society.
The first half of the twentieth century was dotted with sporadic attempts by
African Americans to achieve justice and equality. The National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1910 in
response to lynchings in Illinois, there were race riots in several urban centers
in the years after World War I, and a concerted legal effort to end segregation
had begun by the mid-thirties. The presence of substantial numbers of black
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troops in World War II inevitably began to reshape the preconceptions and
attitudes of many of the white soldiers who fought alongside them. 1954 saw
the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court case that
ended legal segregation of public schools – a ruling that had to be enforced in
Little Rock in 1957 by the National Guard, raising specters of a military occupation. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 led by Martin Luther King began
a period of Thoreau-inspired civil disobedience that would inform the antiwar protests of the following decade. From the earliest days of the Civil Rights
Movement and the philosophical differences between Booker T. Washington
and W.E.B. Du Bois, the struggle was between immediate action and slow
progress; between integration and empowered separation.
The Civil Rights Movement had shown some faint signs of progress following the march on Washington led by Martin Luther King in 1963 and the
passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But the Vietnam War only exacerbated
the racial divide. Many middle-class and affluent white youth learned how to
manipulate the system to avoid the draft or to avoid Vietnam service, so the
troops were disproportionately black. But even before the height of the war,
racial tensions were at the boiling point. There were riots in Harlem in the
summer of 1964, Los Angeles in 1965, Chicago in 1966, and in Detroit and 127
other cities in 1967. The assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 touched
off even more riots around the country. The reasons for the riots were varied
and complex, but they marked a turning point in urban American history
since they served as an indication that the inner cities were becoming predominantly black, while the system of authority remained predominantly
white. The flight of whites from the cities meant a decline in the economic
bases of the cities which led to declining services and crumbling infrastructures. The rise of drug use, disproportionately centered in the ghettos, further
eroded the fabric of society. The role of television went well beyond the
reshaping of American culture; it informed the self-image of American society
in a way that no previous art form or medium ever had. Residents of poor
urban areas, victims of de facto segregation, saw a view of America on television every night that depicted affluent, white, generally suburban life, presented as the epitome of the American dream that was clearly out of reach for
a significant portion of the population. Television news also brought images
and information about both the war and the riots into homes more graphically
and more rapidly than at any previous time in history.
This was the context in which African American drama emerged. Examples
of black theatre date to at least the 1820s, although there was little support
for – in fact much antagonism toward – serious black playwrights and performers until the twenties, and even then it was minimal. Even during the thirties, when Langston Hughes and others were writing and there were Negro
Units of the Federal Theatre Project, the ghost of the minstrel shows hung
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over black theatre. While white audiences would be sporadically supportive
of serious plays about black concerns, especially if written and produced by
whites, they were most comfortable with musical revues that showcased
singing and dancing and which, if not explicitly degrading, nonetheless
seemed to reward black performers for their ability to entertain white audiences, not to make them think. Every seeming advance in black theatre ultimately led to a dead end, the victim of shifts in political or economic climates.
In the postwar era, black concerns with identity, family, and a place in
American society were thematically similar to the concerns of white playwrights. The rising prosperity of the era, the beginnings of foundation grants
that helped subsidize theatres, and the general spirit of liberal integrationism,
all contributed to an atmosphere in which the black theatre could, relatively
speaking, experiment and grow. When Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the
Sun, the first Broadway play both written and directed by African Americans,
premiered in 1959 – the director was Lloyd Richards who would later become
Dean of the Yale Drama School and the director of August Wilson’s plays on
Broadway – it seemed reasonable that this would be the first step toward a
vigorous black presence in the mainstream theatre. The play, about a black
family’s decision to move to a white suburb and the emotional upheaval this
decision caused within the family, embodied the African American attempt to
claim its stake in the American dream and mirrored the first steps toward integration that were then being taken around the country. The chasm between
black and white was a given in Hansberry’s play – neither white society nor
the underlying causes of this gulf were explored. In the best American dramatic tradition, society was encapsulated in the microcosm of the family, and
the solution to social problems was seen in questions of identity, self-worth,
and personal responsibility and action. If the play broke no new ground dramaturgically, it was certainly a well-crafted drama and its ability to tap into contemporary political liberalism without threatening white audiences
contributed to its hit status.
Yet individual successes like this and subsequent ones in the sixties and
seventies, such as The Dream on Monkey Mountain, The River Niger, A Soldier’s
Play, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, and No Place to Be Somebody, which had
successful runs on and Off-Broadway, winning Tonys and Pulitzers along the
way, faced the same problems as commercial drama as a whole, and then
some. These plays were being produced during a period of declining audience
support for serious drama. Moreover, these productions neither paved the
way for a new generation of black producers nor created a coherent theatre
movement within black communities. Despite the incredibly dynamic list of
black playwrights of the late fifties and sixties – Alice Childress, Loften
Mitchell, Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy,
Lonne Elder, Charles Gordone, Ed Bullins, Phillip Hayes Dean, Ron Milner –
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most of these names remain footnotes in the American canon or are relegated
to a separate category. Only in the late eighties did a black playwright, August
Wilson, make it into the list of major American playwrights.
Black playwrights and producers in the twentieth century have always confronted the equivalent dilemma as the social and political activists: do they
write and produce for a black audience or for a white audience? The idealistic answer, that good drama knows no color line, ignores reality. Given the
underlying truth of racial politics in the United States, it is virtually impossible
for a black playwright to write serious drama that does not have racial implications. The playwright, then, must implicitly or explicitly envision an audience, and the decision can have significant financial implications. The
American Negro Theatre, which spanned the war years, epitomized all these
problems. Founded by Abram Hill and Frederick O’Neal in 1939 as an attempt
to fill the gap left by the demise of the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Theatre
Unit, the ANT sought to create a home for black playwrights while providing
an outlet and training for black actors, directors, and technicians. But its
focus was never entirely clear. Its greatest success was Anna Lucasta by white
playwright Philip Yordan. Originally about a Polish working-class family, the
play was adapted for the ANT and its success led to a Broadway transfer. The
drain on the resources and unity of the company because of this production
led to the ultimate demise of the ANT. Their attempt to adapt to white institutions led to temporary success and ultimate failure.
A parallel to Off-Broadway emerged in Harlem in the late forties. Ironically,
the very same forces that were reconfiguring the Broadway theatre were also
affecting the Harlem theatres. Middle-class blacks who had provided the backbone of the theatregoing audience began moving out of Harlem to the suburbs
or to other boroughs. The decline in audience and the general rise in various
costs led to a loss of permanent theatre buildings. With no home base, the
creation of new work became increasingly difficult. The Off-Broadway
Greenwich Mews Theatre in Greenwich Village supported interracial theatre
and in the mid-fifties produced William Branch’s In Splendid Error (1954), Alice
Childress’s Trouble in Mind (1955), and Loften Mitchell’s Land Beyond the
River (1956), all of which dealt directly with racial conflict, though in keeping
with the time they tended to see a future society that was integrated and
unified. Whatever the success of these latter productions, they were geographically far removed from the black communities of New York.
LeRoi Jones came out of the Beat movement and was a model of the assimilated black intellectual. His early plays, The Baptism, The Toilet, and
Dutchman brought the Beat sensibility of raw energy, liminal characters,
poetic language infused with the rhythms of jazz, and gritty and violent
images to the stage. They all dealt with the inability of language to communicate, a theme that took on extra resonance in confrontations between black
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and white, as in the 1964 Dutchman, in which the young black intellectual character Clay, whose command of language had allowed him to negotiate a white
world, was helpless against the verbal gamesmanship of the white temptress
Lula. Clay’s attempts to master the new language game led to his death. The
play was a harbinger of the racial tensions about to erupt in the country as
well as Jones’s own rejection of assimilation in favor of a radical, militant separatism. Like many black activists of the period, Jones rejected his given name
as an oppressive remnant of slavery. As a Marxist-Leninist now known as
Amiri Baraka, he abandoned the white theatre institutions and even the conventions of Western literary drama in favor of agit props and dogmatic sociopolitical dramas. In his manifesto for “The Revolutionary Theatre” Baraka
declared:
What we show must cause the blood to rush, so that pre-revolutionary temperaments will be bathed in this blood, and it will cause their deepest souls
to move, and they will find themselves tensed and clenched, even ready to
die . . . We will scream and cry, murder, run through the streets in agony, if
it means some souls will be moved. (Quoted in Gates, “The Chitlin Circuit,”
47 )
The differing directions of African American theatre were reflected in two
theatres formed in the mid-sixties: the New Lafayette Theatre founded by
Robert Macbeth (1966) and the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) founded by
Douglas Turner Ward (1967). The former was located in Harlem to work within
the community and develop a drama primarily for that audience. A significant
and influential body of work was developed by resident playwright and associate producer Ed Bullins who, like Baraka, abandoned Aristotelian form in
favor of jazz-inspired and ritualistic structures. The NEC sought to produce
plays by black authors and to train African Americans for theatre performance and production but did so in the East Village section of New York, a
place of artistic ferment, but far from the black communities of Harlem or
Bedford-Stuyvesant.
For critics who bemoaned the perceived decline in American (i.e., white)
drama, it appeared as if a vibrant new multifaceted voice was emerging in the
theatre. But as the economic constraints grew ever tighter in commercial
theatre, as middle-class audiences – black and white – fled the cities, and as
racial politics made it increasingly difficult to create seriously engaged drama
that would have a broad audience appeal, African American drama retreated
to the smaller, black-oriented theatres. Thus, by the late seventies, with a few
exceptions such as Ntozake Shange’s poetic dance drama, For Colored Girls
Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, black theatre was
most visible in the form of musicals such as The Wiz that had uncomfortable
echoes once again of minstrelsy.
The riots in the ghettos and the anti-war demonstrations in the capital and
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elsewhere raised specters of insurrection – something, most Americans
believed, that happened in other parts of the world, but not in the United
States. The vision of a decaying society erupting in racial and generational violence, and threatened with nuclear holocaust from frightening political
enemies – however inaccurate this vision might have been – led to inevitable
and fundamental changes in society and thus art and theatre. Absurdist
theatre, which had little success with American audiences in the fifties,
despite popularity in much of Europe, began to find a real, if limited niche. The
plays of Beckett and Ionesco, in particular, with their characters trapped in
bizarre, inexplicable, and frightening worlds in which language either failed
them or turned against them, seemed suddenly relevant in the American landscape of the sixties. Political theatre, which had not been seen in any serious
way since the thirties, was reborn as performers and audiences alike began
to demand that theatre address the social and political problems around
them. Alternative methods of staging and acting as well as playwriting were
investigated as if in an attempt to find a new means of expression for a new
society.
The gulf between theatrical generations could be seen in a 1970 guerilla
theatre piece created by New York University students in response to the
shooting of Kent State students by the National Guard. Armed with portable
tape recorders with recordings of a television statement by the father of one
of the victims questioning whether dissent was possible in this country, three
groups of demonstrators sneaked into Broadway theatres during intermissions. Richard Schechner described the results of the group that went to Forty
Carats, a light Broadway comedy.
About fifteen minutes into the act (at the start of the second scene), the
leader of the group rose and went down the aisle. The other members of the
group responded to the cue and soon the bases of both aisles were filled
with the eight demonstrators. The leader said, “Trina, the girl in this play, is
seventeen. Allison Krause was just two years older than Trina when she was
shot. Her father wants to speak to you.” The tape was played . . . The actors
onstage – June Allyson and Tom Poston – froze as the demonstration began.
They did not attempt to compete with it. Most of the audience was quiet.
About halfway through the tape a woman said, “We didn’t spend $8 to hear
this kind of thing!” Another woman answered, “This is more important than
this trivial play!” Some of the audience joined in the dispute. Tom Poston
said, “All right, girls, you’ve made your point.”10
The protesters were escorted out peacefully by the house manager, who apologized to the audience, and the performance continued. The artifice of the
Broadway fare had been made painfully apparent, yanking the piece into real
time; the inconsequentiality of the piece was contrasted with the darker realities of a distant war and a nation in turmoil. It is unlikely that this or numer-
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ous similar events changed the politics or actions of many in the audience,
but it reinforced a sense of a divided society, divided both culturally and politically, and contributed to the further decay of the Broadway genre.
It was in the midst of the turbulent sixties that Neil Simon, the most commercially successful playwright in American history and possibly the most
maligned, emerged. Come Blow Your Horn premiered on Broadway in 1961 and
he has averaged nearly a play a year ever since. Although his overwhelming
success, broad popular appeal, and prolific output earned him the disdain of
many keepers of serious theatre, he was, strangely, the epitome of many of the
developments of the postwar era. As part of Sid Caesar’s brilliant stable of
writers he was a product of television’s first generation. Though this branded
him in some circles at the time as an interloper from an intellectually and culturally deficient enterprise, Caesar’s Your Show of Shows is now hailed as a
high watermark in a golden age of television, and the writers of that show have
taken on a mythical status. But Simon, in a certain critical sense, was in the
wrong place at the wrong time. His plays were not ostensibly about the radical
changes occurring in the American society of the sixties; they did not deal
with race, the war in Vietnam, poverty, or even the youth culture (except as a
comic reference for baffled members of the over-thirty generation). These
were plays about the Broadway theatre audience, that dying contingent of
white, upper-middle-class, increasingly suburban theatregoers who were
headed toward mid-life crises and for whom the rapid changes in the surrounding world were unfathomable and frightening. As critic John Lahr
observed in the early seventies, “This is the theater of the silent majority. In
the humor are a moral confusion and spiritual dread which show the foundations of the reactionary wilderness that America is becoming, and the
unthinking violence which is condoned as normalcy” (Astonish Me, 121). The
plays, he suggested, showed “images of impotence.”
Though certainly not naturalistic in any conventional sense, these plays –
especially the string of hits from the sixties, Barefoot in the Park, The Odd
Couple, Plaza Suite, Promises, Promises, and The Last of the Red Hot Lovers –
are photographs of a segment of American society. The protagonists in
Simon’s plays have lost all sense of identity and have become unmoored from
any recognizable landscape of societal codes and mores. The sexes do not
know how to communicate, children and parents are enemies separated by
radically different understandings of dress and behavior, and even the very
rooms in which life is conducted and the furniture and appliances of these
abodes take on lives of their own and refuse to yield to the needs and
demands of the occupants. And ultimately, language as a means of successful
and meaningful communication has deserted them. Husbands and wives,
would-be seducers and their intended seducees talk past each other in
uncomprehending syntax. When Oscar and Felix of The Odd Couple argue over
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the difference between spaghetti and linguine it is a scene that echoes the language games of Gogo and Didi in Waiting for Godot or the argument of Ben and
Gus in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter over whether one lights the kettle or
the stove. Audiences recognized and responded to the rhythms and content
made familiar by television. But more careful scrutiny suggests that Simon’s
comedy was of a piece with the Existential drama of the forties and fifties. Neil
Simon’s genius was an ability to take the impulses and techniques of Yiddish
theatre and vaudeville as filtered through television and meld them with the
Broadway comedy-drama. But in the process he grafted – unwittingly one presumes – the themes and strategies of Existentialism and Absurdism onto the
television sitcom, thereby creating the quintessential Broadway theatre of the
sixties.
American mythology was based, at least in part, on the idea of the rugged
individual – the lone cowboy with his gun facing down the bad guys or the
savages. But something went wrong. This iconography had contributed to the
breakdown of society and transformed the United States into a position as
world bully. In seeking new paradigms, alienation and disaffection gave way
to a revival of utopianism and even nineteenth-century communitarianism.
The alternative to the loner was the ensemble; the alternative to the breakdown of society was communal action. The writings of social critic Paul
Goodman and philosopher Herbert Marcuse became the intellectual background of what became known as the “counterculture” – the youthful segment
of society that saw itself as a vast community in opposition to the “establishment.” Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man (1964), argued that the working
class had been neutralized by material goods and that society had lost its
ability to speak out against authority, and therefore must make a radical break
and regain its voice and its rightful place. The already prevalent tactics of civil
disobedience from the Civil Rights Movement coalesced with the student activism of the Free Speech Movement in opposition to the war in Vietnam to generate nearly a decade of mass protests against the war, racism, and the stifling
of utopian ideals. Closely related to this was the rejection of societal strictures
on sexual conduct and drug use. While the Beats, or “Beatniks” as the media
dubbed them, had remained a relatively small and marginal force in the eyes
of the general public, the “hippies” who supplanted them by the mid-sixties
were ubiquitous. Long hair and flamboyant clothes (inspired by the Beatles),
and the loud and public flouting of accepted decorum became the hallmark of
the baby-boom generation.
The utopian and communitarian spirit manifested itself in the theatre
through ensembles and collectives – groups of performers and writers coming
together to create theatre through communal input and creative energy. The
ideal and the reality seldom meshed. The most successful of the ensemble
groups – the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Open Theatre, the Bread and
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Puppet Theatre, the Performance Group, and the Manhattan Project – were
founded and led by strong, even charismatic individuals: R.G. Davis, Joseph
Chaikin, Peter Schumann, Richard Schechner, and Andre Gregory.
Nonetheless, within these groups, the typical hierarchies of theatrical creation were eliminated or reordered with some success. Ideas for productions
were often generated by the company, scripts were evolved through months
of improvisation around themes and ideas, the production jobs were democratically divided among group members, and income, meager though it
might be, was shared communally. From a stylistic point of view, the major
effect of the ensemble companies was to shift the emphasis of drama from the
literary and narrative qualities of scripts to an actor-dominated theatre within
which thematically structured texts were enacted in a highly physical and
emblematic style of performance. In a period in which distrust of language
was growing, verbal communication was increasingly problematic, and
writers like Norman O. Brown and Wilhelm Reich were celebrating the body,
it seemed logical that theatre would begin to abandon its traditional Western
role as a place for the enactment of language in favor of physical expression
which was seen as more honest and expressive. “The resurrection of the
body,” Brown wrote in Life Against Death in 1959, “is a social project facing
mankind as a whole and it will become a practical political problem when the
statesmen of the world are called upon to deliver happiness instead of power”
(317).
The ensemble theatre movement was most ideally embodied by the Open
Theatre, founded as an offshoot of the Living Theatre in 1963. Frustrated with
the Living’s lack of attention to actor training and technique, the Open
Theatre emerged out of the work of Joseph Chaikin and several other Living
Theatre actors who began to meet to explore techniques for dealing with nonrealistic texts, which, in 1963, meant largely Absurdist material. Chaikin felt
that a vibrant theatre could only emerge from the unique vocabulary of an
ensemble of actors. Working with theatre games and improvisations based on
the work of Viola Spolin and Nola Chilton, they developed new approaches to
training that emphasized physical virtuosity. Eventually, inspired by Brecht
and working with playwrights such as Jean-Claude Van Itallie, they began to
develop scripts that dealt with social and political concerns, including
America Hurrah, Viet Rock, and, in 1967, The Serpent, an exploration of the
myths and themes of the Book of Genesis. The work was created through
months of improvisation, reading about creation myths with anthropologist
Joseph Campbell, and relating the Biblical events to contemporary society
through a recreation of the John F. Kennedy assassination. All the action was
done simply and expressively in a non-illusionistic way – the presence of the
actor behind the character was always apparent and the movement between
character and performer was always fluid; there were direct addresses to the
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audience and personal revelations by the performers. Subsequent productions by the Open Theatre moved further away from language as the primary
means of communication; ideas were expressed equally, if not more so,
through image and gesture.
The traditional physical arrangement of theatre was designed for audiences to listen and to watch. But if there were to be new paradigms of acting,
creation, and production it seemed logical to disrupt the role of the audience
as well. Richard Schechner, who as editor of the Tulane Drama Review chronicled the emergence of the new experimental theatre, founded the
Performance Group in 1967. Drawing heavily on the ideas of Polish director
Jerzy Grotowski, Schechner’s theatre explored ritual and myth, ensemblestyle acting, and environmental staging. Environmental staging took a variety
of forms but in its basic form transformed the entire theatre into potential performing space in which actors and spectators shared space or negotiated the
use of space during the course of the performance. Schechner’s challenge to
the conventional staging set off a decade of exploration and experimentation
that reached even Broadway in productions such as Candide directed by
Harold Prince and designed by Eugene Lee.
The first, and most notorious, production of the Performance Group was
Dionysus in ’69, based on Euripides’ The Bacchae and staged in a converted
industrial space in the Soho district of Manhattan. Scaffolding built around
the interior walls served as audience area as well as performance space.
Audience members were encouraged to move about during the performance
to constantly alter their relationship to the piece. The ritual-like action of the
production, the nudity of the performers, the scenes suggesting Dionysian
orgies, the unorthodox spatial arrangement, and the general sense of sexual
freedom and anarchistic behavior that accompanied the rise of the hippie
culture in the late sixties contributed to audience participation that often
tested the actors’ ability to maintain control of the performance. The danger
inherent in removing both the physical and psychological barriers between
spectators and performers while at the same time emphasizing the presence
of the actors as themselves rather than as characters is that it invites the audience to participate in the action without understanding that there is the presence of a text. In the case of Dionysus in ’69, some spectators literally jumped
into the pseudo-rituals and some male spectators took the nudity and sensuality of the female performers as an invitation to physical intimacy. The Group
found that it had to re-establish certain boundaries that literally or implicitly
told the audience when they could participate and when they had to remain
passive spectators.
The Living Theatre encountered a similar response when they returned
from Europe in 1968 with four ensemble pieces that had been created abroad.
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These productions served as the final catalyst for the destruction of conventional performer–spectator relationships and of traditional literary texts.
Their production of Paradise Now was an episodic meditation on the war in
Vietnam and a virtual catalogue of the ills of society as filtered through the
group’s anarchist philosophy. The piece began with the actors moving
through the auditorium, whispering a series of statements to the spectators,
culminating in the declaration, “I am not allowed to take my clothes off in
public,” whereupon they stripped down to loin cloths. Invariably, members of
the audience joined in this action. By the end of the performance actors and
audience, some completely naked, had completely intermingled on the stage
and auditorium – the normal hierarchy of performer and spectator had been
obliterated. For the Living Theatre this was a model for the utopian world
order with no hierarchies and no leaders, only communal spirit. The actors
led the audience to the doors of the theatre, encouraging them to carry on the
revolution in the street. But the audiences attracted to the performances of
the newly returned Living Theatre were largely middle-class theatregoers and
college students, so the radical message and urge to political action carried
only so far. But the total thwarting of dramatic expectations did have a significant effect upon staging and theatrical creation for the next decade, seeming
once and for all to destroy any physical and aesthetic barriers to new ideas
and new forms of theatre. The down-side to such exercises, however, was that
they easily lent themselves to self-indulgent theatre that lacked inspiration or
rigor. (For another perspective on acting in alternative theatre, see Hirsch,
Chapter 6.)
In the 1970s, the communal movement transformed into spiritual quests
for self-fulfillment. The hippies were not a coherent political movement; they
were part of an amorphous cultural rebellion. The emphasis on drugs and sex
that preoccupied many, and a greater interest in popular music than in leftwing politics, led the country away from utopian idealism toward a more selfcentered point of view. As the singularity of purpose of the political movement
evaporated the emphasis shifted from changing the “system” to working on
the self. In the vacuum created by the collapse of clear-cut ideologies and
causes, “new age” movements, groups, and cults ranging from consciousnessraising encounter groups, to yoga-centered ashrams, to the Esalen Institute,
sprang up to transform the mind and spirit. Transcendental meditation taught
by Indian gurus (first brought to public attention by the Beatles) became
popular; complex social, philosophical, and political thought was simplified
and popularized by such figures as Alan Watts (Zen), Fritz Perls (gestalt
therapy), Wilhelm Reich, R.D. Laing, and Carlos Castaneda (hallucinatory
mysticism).
Within a decade, from 1959 to 1969, the combined effect of Happenings
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and Chance Theatre, and the productions of the Living Theatre, Open
Theatre, and Performance Group as well as the ideas of Artaud and Brecht
and the productions of Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre along with
several other similar groups, served to destroy the grip of narrative theatre,
linear structure, language-based scripts, thematic texts, psychological characterization and emotionally-based acting, and the post-Renaissance relationships of performer and spectator. In other words, the entire basis of
modern Western theatre was brought into question. It was a heady time, and
from the narrow view of the theatre artists experimenting in these new forms
it appeared as if the whole structure of theatre was about to change. As with
the larger society, however, greater political and economic forces and the
inertia of more conservative audiences and artists meant that radical change
would be either absorbed into the mainstream or ultimately discarded. (See
Carlson, Chapter 2, “Alternative Theatre,” for additional coverage of alternative theatres.)
Off-Off Broadway, New Plays, New Musicals
In that moment between the assassination of President Kennedy and the eruptions of racial violence and the massive protests against the war in Vietnam
which would galvanize the artistic community into renewed activity, the progressive spirit and adventurousness that had seemingly always typified the
American sensibility became confused and unfocused. Even the once
dynamic American rock’n’roll had become lifeless and sentimental and was
overwhelmed in 1964 by the so-called British invasion of the Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, and others, as was the still vigorous rhythm and blues of
Motown. A similar fate befell Broadway. The plays of Harold Pinter, John
Osborne, Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer, Arnold Wesker, Ann Jellicoe, Robert
Bolt, and Edward Bond began to appear on and Off-Broadway and in the repertoires of college and regional theatres. And, in 1965, Peter Brook and the
Royal Shakespeare Company stunned audiences with their New York production of Peter Weiss’s The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed
by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de
Sade. In terms of challenging the audience’s preconceptions of its relationship
to the stage and to performers, the production did little that the Living
Theatre’s production of The Connection or Kenneth Brown’s The Brig had not
already done. But it brought rigorously trained actors and much more highly
polished scenography to the production than the Living Theatre ever had
done, while finding a mesmerizing form of expression for the ideas of Brecht
and Artaud. Three years later, in his book The Empty Space, Brook would
write, “The Theatre and life are one,” and it was true for many spectators that
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despite the blatant theatricality of this production, the separation of performance and life began to be blurred. Also, in comparison to almost any
American play of the period, Marat/Sade was sophisticated and complex in its
exploration of history, philosophy, politics, and human sociology.
In a season in which the American highlights of the Broadway scene were
such mild and unmemorable shows as Generation, The Impossible Years, and
On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Marat/Sade was a shocking revelation
that, in a sense, did for American theatre what Sputnik did for the American
space program: it was a wakeup call that galvanized those concerned about
the fate of theatre.
From about 1965 on, as a result of the combined effects of Off-Broadway,
the regional theatres, and the British invasion, virtually no play by an
American author other than Neil Simon that has received critical acclaim or
has made it into the “canon” originated on Broadway. Almost all the major
writers of the post-sixties American theatre have originated their work OffBroadway or outside New York, and the majority of their plays have never
been performed on Broadway.
The first wave of new playwrights to arise in the wake of Albee and Kopit
came largely from the emergent Off-Off Broadway. The term Off-Off Broadway
was coined by Village Voice critic Jerry Tallmer in 1960 in an attempt to categorize the increasing amount of new work that was originating beyond the by
now well-established and increasingly expensive Off-Broadway. Starting in the
late fifties, makeshift theatres were created in the cafés, churches, and lofts of
Greenwich Village and its environs. The first of these was Caffe Cino, created
by Joe Cino in 1959 in his coffeehouse as a place to present new plays on a
minuscule platform that served as a stage. If anything united these early OffOff Broadway theatres it was their dedication to new plays, their flagrant,
even proud disregard of the niceties of commercial production and dramatic
precepts, and their lack of concern for financial success (other than, perhaps,
the basic need for survival).
Of the original Off-Off Broadway group it was La MaMa that had the most
long-lasting and far-reaching impact. Created by the dynamic and enigmatic
Ellen Stewart, who came to New York as a fashion designer from Louisiana via
Chicago (retaining an accent that was part Cajun, part indeterminate), La
MaMa became the home to all the new young playwrights and many of the
young directors, actors, and designers of the period. Stewart fought city
bureaucracy and indirect censorship to support the work of her “children,”
as she called them. Leonard Melfi, Julie Bovasso, Sam Shepard, Paul Foster,
Tom Eyen, Adrienne Kennedy, Rochelle Owens, Megan Terry, and many more
playwrights all had premieres there; Tom O’Horgan, Meredith Monk, Ping
Chong, Richard Foreman, and Richard Schechner have directed there; and
European directors Andrei Serban, Tadeusz Kantor, and Eugenio Barba,
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among others, were brought to America by her. Well into the eighties each performance began with Stewart ringing a bell and welcoming spectators to “Café
La MaMa, dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theatre.” She
would then pass a basket for donations – the standard method of income production for Off-Off Broadway in the early days. After finding a permanent
home on East Fourth Street and changing from a membership club (a ruse to
get around various regulations and ordinances) to a regular theatre known as
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, admission was charged. In 1965, Stewart
took a company on the first of several European and world tours. This, plus
the presence of the Living Theatre, awakened Europeans to the emergence of
a vital American avant-garde, and this in turn had a strong influence on the
revitalization of a European avant-garde.
In addition to those mentioned above, the playwrights who came out of
these early Off-Off Broadway theatres included Terrence McNally, Israel
Horovitz, Rosalyn Drexler, Maria Irene Fornés, Robert Patrick, Ron Tavel,
Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Murray Mednick, and Lanford Wilson. Though
several of these playwrights went on to critical acclaim – by the seventies, for
instance, Sam Shepard was generally considered the successor to Albee –
only McNally and Wilson have had commercial success. A few made it into the
canon of Off-Broadway and regional theatres, several wrote for Hollywood,
but some have never moved past their Off-Off Broadway venues. There has
probably been no other period in history in which the divide between critical
acceptance and popular and commercial success has been so great. (See
Gussow, Chapter 2, “Off- and Off-Off Broadway,” for the fuller history of Off-Off
Broadway.)
Part of the chasm between the new writers and the traditional theatre institutions can be explained by the frames of reference within which each operated. Both the producers and consumers of mainstream theatre at
mid-century were still rooted in essentially nineteenth-century melodrama
forms. The linear structure of narrative and the psychological basis of character formed the basis for drama, opera, movies, and even classical ballet. So
strong were these influences that the perceptions of the real world were often
shaped by these artistic forces. But for the new writers of the sixties, the
primary influences were contemporary plastic arts, rock music and jazz,
movies, radio, television, comic books, and the burgeoning drug culture. From
the visual arts came a familiarity with abstraction and, especially in the wake
of Jackson Pollock, an emphasis on process over content. From jazz came
ideas of improvisation, dissonance, and an abandonment of traditional structures and even of standard lengths; from rock’n’roll, of course, came an attitude of rebellion and sexuality, an emphasis on volume over subtlety, and the
development of an idea or emotion within a simple repetitive structure contained in a three-minute frame. Meanwhile, the vocabulary of film editing –
jump cuts, reverse angles, cutaways, and the like – together with radio and
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television’s disruption of narrative flow by commercials, created a comfort
and familiarity with non-linear structure. Comic books had a surprisingly
similar effect. While many comics were simple narrative sequences of frames,
many of the action comics developed a complex page layout that was almost
cubistic in its juxtaposition of images, overlapping of time sequences, and
unfolding of narrative information. The drug culture also contributed to a
greater acceptance of jarring temporal and visual juxtapositions. All these
factors created a new vocabulary of popular culture and a referential framework far removed from the high and middle culture that had informed serious
theatre through the first half of the century. Popular culture became the
culture of the United States and thus the basis of much new theatre.
The result was short plays – vignettes to one-acts – which often abandoned
any semblance of Aristotelian structure, and placed an emphasis on riff-like
flights of language, shocking and grotesque subject matter and imagery, broad
references to pop culture, a frequent acknowledgment of the audience or the
theatrical nature of the play, and rapid shifts in focus. Production values were
limited and the necessity of homemade sets, costumes, and lights were turned
into stylistic virtues. Amateur acting was likewise emphasized as preferential
to the slickness of commercial theatre. Nudity became a hallmark of the late
sixties. Even when the lack of clothing was justified by the script it sometimes
seemed as if the script had been written simply to justify the nudity. The daringness of disrobing in public or the supposed freedom it symbolized was
exploited, much as it had been in the English Restoration when actresses were
first permitted on the stage. Needless to say, it was almost always the women
who wound up naked.
The plays and productions of Off-Off Broadway were superficially related
to Absurdism – drawing upon the stylistic vocabulary while jettisoning the
Existential content. In place of the need for rigorous personal engagement
advocated by Sartre and Camus, playwrights like Leonard Melfi, Israel
Horovitz, John Ford Noonan, and others seemed to advocate the redemptive
power of love as a panacea for all human problems – a philosophy derived
from Erich Fromm and propagated via the Beatles and other representatives
of pop culture. This meshed well with New Left philosophies woven together
from the political ideas of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, the social
concepts of Erving Goffman and R.D. Laing, and the cultural critiques of
Marshall McLuhan and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The plays exhibited a neoRousseau-like faith in the innate goodness of natural man while emphasizing
spirituality (with a healthy dose of Zen and other Eastern philosophies) and
revealing a mistrust of science and the rational mind. The result was ultimately a sentimental theatre that, despite the frequent rejection of
Aristotelian structure, was an echo of Romantic drama and often melodramatic in spirit.
The majority of the literally thousands of plays that were produced in the
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dozens of Off-Off Broadway venues in the sixties and seventies were, in the
words of critic and writer Michael Smith, “tentative, lacking in craft, technically crude” (quoted in Berkowitz, New Broadways, 97); in reality, most were
just bad theatre. But they were a training ground for dozens of playwrights
and hundreds of actors, directors, designers, and producers. In earlier times,
when theatre was more plentiful and tickets less expensive, young theatre
artists could learn by working in various capacities on scores of productions
or going to the theatre every night – as Beck and Malina had done as recently
as the forties. But by the sixties, there was far less theatre to see, and it was
increasingly inaccessible financially to many would-be spectators. Theatre
artists had to reinvent the theatre in order to learn from it.
Of all the Off-Off Broadway playwrights, it was Sam Shepard who most successfully wove together new dramatic and theatrical techniques with contemporary American themes. He was one of the first of the new playwrights not
merely writing about the changing society, but finding a theatrical vocabulary
that embodied the new culture. More than any of his contemporaries, Shepard
found – through inventive, driving, and poetic language – a vibrant and resonant means of expressing a view of American society. In a certain sense,
Shepard’s plays – usually set within a western or rural landscape – with their
loners and rugged individuals struggling against the numbing forces of faceless institutions and society at large, were well within the American tradition
of Clyde Fitch, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and even Neil
Simon. What separated his works from their thematically related predecessors was a shift to structures more akin to rock, beat poetry, and jazz than to
classical narrative. His early plays in particular were filled with long monologues of associative language. They would often incorporate elements of the
supernatural and science fiction; time and space would not be presented as
obstacles to the interaction of characters or the line of action. Figures from
the Old West and Native American culture or their contemporary equivalents
would populate the landscape.
By the mid-seventies Shepard seemed to have his finger on the pulse of
American culture, and he ultimately won a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child
(1978), which, like almost all the acclaimed American dramas of the twentieth
century, focused on the family unit as a metaphor for American society and a
locus for the failure of communication and human interaction. But many of
Shepard’s plays gave the impression of having flowed virtually unedited from
his fertile imagination, which suggested to some critics a lack of discipline.
The non-Aristotelian structure, the narrative and thematic digressions, and
occasionally enigmatic symbolism combined to worry producers and alienate
audiences more attuned to conventional commercial fare. Despite continued
critical praise, intense loyalty from an ever-growing audience, and a significant body of journalistic and academic writing devoted to his prodigious
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output, no work of his appeared on Broadway until 1996 with a revival of
Buried Child, and that production was a commercial failure. (For discussions
of Shepard and other playwrights mentioned in this chapter, see Chapter 3.)
There was one successful crossover from the Off-Off Broadway sensibility
to commercial theatre in the musical Hair, the first rock musical and the inaugural offering of Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in 1967. It moved for a brief
time to a disco before being reworked into a Broadway production under the
direction of Tom O’Horgan, who had established a reputation directing many
of the new plays at Café LaMaMa, and who here created an imaginative staging
derived in part from the neo-Expressionist physical-ensemble work of the
Living Theatre and Open Theatre.
The show’s lasting success was ultimately a result of the bedrock of
musical theatre: good music that was catchy and uplifting. But the producer
Michael Butler had the genius to tap into two audiences. Billed as a “Tribal
Love-Rock Musical,” it appealed to the youthful counterculture movement,
many of whom, despite revolutionary rhetoric, had ample disposable cash for
Broadway tickets. There was also a contingent of the hippie culture who
believed that the performers were part of some communal movement and
who came to New York and camped out on the steps of the theatre, sometimes
being invited to participate in the finale. On the other hand, the production
catered to the prurient interests of the older, traditional Broadway audience.
Couching it in terms of the sexual revolution, the first half ended with a notorious nude scene. It was later revealed that some of the performers were paid
a bonus if they would take off their clothes. Thus cynical marketing mixed
with the apparently naive politics of the flower children. (See Chapter 2,
Maslon, “Broadway,” and especially Chapter 4.)
Though Hair was seen at the time as the harbinger of the rock musical (and
thus the revival and future of the musical theatre) only a few abortive musicals followed in its wake. The fundamental three-chord, three-minute structure of traditional rock’n’roll was antithetical to the structures of musical
theatre, and as late sixties rock was transformed by drugs into psychedelia
and repetitive and unstructured epical formats, the possibilities for a vital
rock musical theatre diminished. At the same time, because of venues like the
Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in New York and
the rise of discos, theatricality flowed from the legitimate theatre into rock
auditoria, and with it, the audience that might have regenerated the theatre.
The inventive pyrotechnics that were seen in a nascent form in Hair were
exploited in the ever larger rock concerts by Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and
the later tours of the Rolling Stones, the Who, Kiss, and their progeny.
The massive sums of money generated by rock music, and the perceived
need to make the concerts ever more spectacular drove technological developments in lighting, sound, and stage hydraulics. By the mid-seventies, rock
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concerts had, in fact, become the new musicals. Held together by thematically
related visual images, even on occasion by a crude book structure, the concerts were high-tech versions of the seventeenth-century French machine
plays, and nineteenth-century pantomimes and spectacles. They would
return to haunt theatre in several ways. Audiences grew accustomed to
amplified sound and what might be called amplified light. Rock concerts, the
lighting of public spaces, outdoor advertising, and even television raised the
threshold of visibility so that audiences became dependent on ever increasing amounts of light to render something visible. Computerized control of
lighting and stage mechanics led to an expectation of movement and constant
change. Traditional theatre lighting seemed dark and crude by comparison.
British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and producer Cameron
Mackintosh seemed to understand the theatrical appeal of rock concerts and
were responsible for a string of successful spectacle musicals in the eighties
such as Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon. Lush and pseudo-operatic, and generally lacking the pop tunes of earlier musicals, these productions depended on lavish decor and special effects to support their sweeping
and romantic plots. Though frequently decried by critics, they had a broad
popular appeal and functioned as tourist attractions, especially for the
increasing numbers of non-English-speaking tourists flooding New York, for
whom the minimal language of these spectacles was no obstacle.
For the occupants of the spreading suburban landscape, the most spectacular theatre they encountered – though they would never perceive it as such
– was the great shopping malls of the eighties and nineties. Like the fantasyworld casinos of Las Vegas and like Disney World, the malls were fantastic
stage settings – theatrical facades recalling exotic locales, idyllic home towns,
or chic urban centers. Entering into one of these malls was like entering into
an elaborate stage or movie setting. The spectator-consumer made a pilgrimage through arid highways and parking lots and was instantly transformed
upon entering a world that promised to fulfill desires and meet all possible
needs. For the middle-class suburban theatre audience, going into the city to
attend the theatre was a similar journey. It was necessary, therefore, that the
theatre provide as spectacular and stimulating an experience as going to the
mall. Part of the reason for Lloyd Webber’s popularity among these suburban
audiences (and perhaps the greater disdain from urban dwellers) was that his
theatre produced that experience. Phantom of the Opera and the Mall of
America were, on some level, equivalent.
The New Formalism
A formalist theatre privileges the external form or structure of a piece over
specific content. The meaning, as it were, is derived through an experience of
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the form, not necessarily through a reading of the content. Robert Wilson’s
opera Einstein on the Beach, for example, could be said to be about the threat
of nuclear holocaust and the potential power of the atom, since such ideas
can be found in the images and text of the opera, yet the “meaning” of the
piece resides in the music, the performance, and the repetitive structure of its
action and imagery. A primary source for the development of modern formalist theatre was Minimalism, the art world’s response to the emotionalism and
process-oriented creations of Abstract Expressionism. With roots in Russian
Constructivism and Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” from the teens,
Minimalist artists placed an emphasis on rationally designed artworks using
industrial and other man-made materials. The result was sculptures and
paintings that announced the use of real objects in real space. The constructions were conceptually rigorous, simple and literal in presentation, and
meant to be appreciated in their own right, not as reference to something else
or as an illusion. The predictability of mathematical repetition became a stylistic feature of much of this work. If the unmediated flow of the subconscious
as in Pollock’s action paintings was one response to the unfathomable horrors
of the postwar world, and Absurdism another, then the rigor and rationalism
of Minimalism was another possible, if very different, response. Minimalist
aesthetics spread in the sixties from painting and sculpture to music, dance,
and theatre. The modular structures and repetitive phrasings of the compositions of Philip Glass and Steve Reich were prime examples of Minimalist
music; the repetitive use of “found” gestures – that is everyday instead of virtuosic movement – that typified the postmodern dance of Yvonne Rainer,
Lucinda Childs, and David Gordon is similarly inspired; and the eighties rock
of Brian Eno and David Byrne fits in this category. Even the so-called concept
musicals can be seen in the context of Minimalism.
Structured around thematic ideas, the shape and dynamic of the concept
musical follows the structures of music and dance or the structures dictated
by the concept rather than a traditional narrative. The concept musical
reached its peak in 1975 with the Michael Bennett production of A Chorus Line.
Though this work, about the lives and tribulations of Broadway dancers was,
in some ways, the outgrowth of the ensemble theatre movement of the late
sixties, with its spirit of collaboration and group creation, its modular structure of a series of monologues and confessions while standing on the stark
white line of an otherwise bare stage (in a setting designed by Robin Wagner)
indicates a Minimalist influence. Some of the works of composer-lyricist
Stephen Sondheim, such as Company and Follies, can also be seen in this light.
The creators of the new formalist theatre of the seventies rejected the
ensemble in favor of the single creator, the cool detachment of formalist aesthetics, and the frequent use of the self as both subject and source. If the
ensemble theatre movement had been in some ways an expression of political alternatives to existing societal structures, then the formalist theatre
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could be seen as a reversion to the American myth of the lone explorer forging
new paths in the wilderness. With its rejection of the emotionally cathartic
experience, formalist theatre could also be seen as a response to the failure
of alternative life styles to transform society in the significantly utopian ways
that had been anticipated.
The two major exponents of this theatre were Robert Wilson and Richard
Foreman. Although both these artists headed theatre companies – the Byrd
Hoffman Foundation and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, respectively –
their work was a singular inner vision created through total control of the
creative and producing process. Despite ultimately differing aesthetics, there
were certain stylistic similarities and shared influences in their early works.
The excruciatingly slow pace of their early productions, the strong emphasis
on striking visual images, the abandonment of not only narrative but even
overt thematic structures, and the elimination of conventional emotional
expression by the actors that typified their productions in the early seventies
were in marked contrast to the energetic, physical, actor-centered ensemble
theatre of the time. Critic Bonnie Marranca coined the term “theatre of
images” to describe the work of Foreman, Wilson, and Mabou Mines, the latter
a collective theatre founded in 1970 by Lee Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Ruth
Maleczech.
A significant influence on both directors was the theories and dramas of
Gertrude Stein, particularly her concept of “landscape drama.” Stein posited
the idea of landscape in opposition to the conventional linear narrative.
Narrative drama, she felt, kept the spectator in a kind of syncopation, always
being ahead of or behind the action on stage, thus creating a disjointed view.
She preferred a theatre that emphasized “sight and sound and its relation to
emotion and time, rather than in relation to story and action” (“Plays”, 104).
She wanted an art that existed in the present moment, a performance which
the spectator would experience completely in the present moment.
Wilson took the notion of landscape fairly literally. His work focused on the
dream state – what he called the “inner screen.” Using his work with autistic
and brain-damaged children, he sought to understand how such individuals
perceived the world. His pieces were typified by great length (The Life and
Times of Joseph Stalin was twelve hours; KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia
TERRACE, created for the Shiraz Festival in Iran in 1972, took place as a continuous performance over seven days on the hills of Haft-tan Mountain), slow
movement, bold and startling images, repetitive language, and hypnotic
music – they were, in a sense, paintings or landscapes come to life on the
stage. At least part of the intention was to alter the consciousness of the spectators, to plunge them into a world in which the distinction between dream
and rational vision was blurred, a goal that made him an heir to the
Surrealists.
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Foreman’s work was also inspired by Gertrude Stein, though he focused
more on her concept of the continuous present and the idea of “beginning
again and again,” by which she meant disrupting the linear flow in order to
keep the spectator constantly in the present moment. This approach meshed
surprisingly well with a vocabulary and stylistic approach derived from
Brechtian aesthetics, though lacking the more overt political aspects.
Foreman’s goal was to disrupt emotional involvement and thus force the spectator into a conscious awareness of the act of watching so that the experience
of the performance would lead to a fresh understanding of the world. Though
the content of his plays was drawn from readings in science and philosophy,
the plays were never “about” such ideas; rather their structure embodied
these concepts in a three-dimensional dramatic form. Foreman’s primary
influence came not from theatre but from avant-garde film known as the New
American Cinema. Foreman was impressed with the singular vision, the lack
of concern with polished images, and the self-referential nature of these independent films. In them he saw artists pursuing their own ideas, not hampered
by the needs of collaboration.
It was in the Wooster Group, created by members of Schechner’s
Performance Group in the late seventies, that almost every thread of postwar
American drama coalesced. Their work combined the impulses of the ensemble movement out of which they had grown, and the formalist theatre, while
drawing inspiration from both avant-garde art and classic American drama.
Director Elizabeth LeCompte began working with autobiographical material
provided by actor Spalding Gray and members of the company to create a performance. The first work was entitled Sakonnet Point, which became the first
part of a trilogy known as Three Places in Rhode Island. The use of autobiography as raw material was, of course, not new and it has been present to
varying degrees in much twentieth-century American drama. But here it was
essentially unmediated by any fictional context – so much so that ethical and
legal questions were raised when Gray used a tape of a conversation with his
mother’s psychiatrist in Rumstick Road that dealt with his mother’s suicide.
In its use of autobiography it mirrored a new form known as performance art
which was developing within the world of conceptual art. In performance art
the artist did not create a tangible art object but presented the self as the work
of art through autobiographical performance pieces, or by framing aspects of
everyday life so that quotidian activity became identified as a work of art. But
most such performances were almost always solo pieces. In the work of the
Wooster Group, autobiographical material was being shaped by a strong,
visionary director, and developed in conjunction with an ensemble of actors.
Eventually, Gray went on to develop solo monologues which were not mere
story-telling but were carefully configured dramatic pieces. The most fascinating aspect of Gray’s monologues was that the central character, Spalding Gray,
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was not his true, unmediated self, as he appeared to be for most audiences,
but a careful theatrical construct based upon himself – a fictional character
very closely based on the real performer. LeCompte, meanwhile, began to
explore classic texts including Our Town, The Crucible, and The Three Sisters,
among others, which became, respectively, Route 1 & 9, L.S.D (. . . Just the High
Points), and Brace Up!. All of these productions represented the unique vision
of LeCompte, which would seem to place her in the tradition of Foreman and
Wilson, yet the pieces were created by the ensemble. They were, if such a
thing is possible, ensemble performance art.
By re-examining plays that had become part of the theatrical canon, the
Wooster Group acknowledged the centrality of these texts in contemporary
culture. Yet these plays were also rooted in their own time and place. Mere
updating through alteration of locale or time period as many productions of
classics often did would not, the group believed, be sufficient and could even
trivialize the plays. LeCompte and the Wooster Group reframed and recontextualized the plays in a radical way in order to create a contemporary response
to the works. As a result of this approach the productions were sometimes
identified as deconstructionist. Insofar as the productions dismantled texts
for the purpose of exploration they fit the literal definition of the term, but
these productions had little to do with Derridean notions of deconstruction,
although they correspond to the larger postmodern aesthetic as defined by
Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson. Rather than proving that the text
has no inherent authority, as the deconstructionist theoreticians assert, these
productions sought to find fresh meanings and reverberations in a contemporary world. The original texts became merely one component in a new and
larger performance text that drew upon the particular theatrical world of the
Wooster Group. This world included references to past productions, to the
panorama of contemporary American culture, to Kabuki theatre, movies, and
even racial and gender politics, though the latter was presented as an aspect
of contemporary culture rather than as particular sociopolitical tract. The
Wooster Group both devoured and re-presented contemporary culture; they
had no overt political agenda.
As noted, performance art became, by the late seventies, the most ubiquitous form of avant-garde theatre. With roots in the work of Vladimir
Mayakovsky, Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists, Happenings, the political
monologues of comedian Lenny Bruce, and the almost unclassifiable theatrical performances of Jack Smith, performance art began to emerge in the late
sixties, first among artists such as Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneeman, Linda
Montano, and Chris Burden, and then increasingly among theatre performers.
In its rejection of conventional theatrical illusion it can be seen as a logical
outgrowth of the work of the Living Theatre. It was also an attack on the commercialization of art, since nothing other than documentation remained of the
creative act; there was nothing that could be bought or sold. Its emphasis
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upon autobiography, and particularly the body, made it the ideal ground for
feminist artists and performers to explore concepts of gender. Building on the
ideas of the Dadaists and the Living Theatre, early performance art explored
the intersection of life and art: the actions of daily life became art and vice
versa. Finally, the utter simplicity of much performance art – a single performer on a bare stage, although it could certainly be more complex – seemed
an inevitable response to the age of increasing costs. Perhaps because performance art seemed a natural outgrowth of the new age preoccupation with the
self, it was not surprising that much of the new performance shifted from New
York to California, where so many new age ideas originated.
The Theatre of Identity
Throughout the seventies and eighties, the politics of identity made it increasingly difficult to critique theatre from any universal or absolute viewpoint.
Any work of art was seen as representative of the culture that created it, and
the diverse culture of the United States was no longer perceived as a vast
melting pot as it had been for much of the century, but as a “mosaic” or
“salad,” to use two of the more colorful metaphors, in which the diverse elements retained their individual identities and characteristics. Thus, one could
no longer talk about the theatre but about women’s theatre, Hispanic theatre,
black theatre, gay theatre, and so on. The theatre that grew out of the migrant
farm workers’ strikes in southern California was Chicano theatre, which was
distinctly different from the Latino theatre of New York; theatre by women was
seen as separate from theatre by men, but distinct from feminist theatre,
which in and of itself might be categorized by differing social and political
agendas. These developments allowed voices to be heard that had previously
been silent or muted in the American theatre and as a result they began to
reach new audiences. While this multivocal, multicultural approach could
lead to a revitalization of theatre it could also have the opposite effect. A fragmented theatre is difficult to maintain; a theatre with a limited audience often
does not have the resources to sustain itself. On the other hand, many of these
identity oriented theatres sprang up in response to a specific need at a particular time and then faded as the needs changed.
Various forms of feminist theatre have had some of the most significant
impact on late-century American theatre and drama. The vitality and sheer
quantity of women’s theatres springing up around the country beginning in
the late seventies created an energy and innovation in theatre production
similar to that of Off-Off Broadway at its peak. As important was a concurrent
development of a significant body of theory that had implications well beyond
feminist theatre.
Feminism, which had remained fairly silent since the suffragist movement
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succeeded in 1920, began to re-emerge in the sixties, stimulated in part by the
Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protests. Although women had been
making strides toward social, political, and economic parity with men
throughout the century, there was a backlash of sorts following World War II.
The women who had necessarily constituted a significant portion of the labor
force during the war were now being actively encouraged to return to their
“rightful” place in the domestic order. Postwar studies in child psychology
suggested that children’s happiness depended on the active presence of the
mother; the middle-class move to suburbia isolated women in their homes;
manufacturers created vast panoplies of “labor-saving” appliances and
cleansing products with the clear message that the woman’s first task was
keeping the home and family clean. Television’s situation comedies created a
new breed of “supermoms” who were domestic, patient, subservient to
husband and children, and always impeccably dressed and coifed even when
doing household chores. Television commercials and programs, and to a
lesser extent movies, suggested that the major cause of domestic strife was
the wrong choice in household products.
In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which exploded the
myth of domestic bliss and fulfillment and articulated many of the frustrations
and anger of women from many sectors of society. This book served as a catalyst for a revitalization of the women’s movement, beginning with the
National Organization for Women in 1966 and many other, often more radical
groups, later. The initial efforts of many of these organizations were aimed at
equality and parity in the labor, education, and political arenas, a movement
generally known as liberal feminism. But inspired in part by French feminist
theorists, several writers began to re-examine the larger situation of women
within the society. Radical feminists emphasized differences between men
and women while often stressing the superiority of female modes of behavior
and thought and, like the militant black movement, advocating separatism;
materialist feminists, drawing upon Marxism, looked at the effects of race,
class, and gender on women’s place in society and advocated the importance
of the group over the individual. One aspect of feminist theory was the
concept of the “gaze” – who is watching whom and how does the act of watching alter both the observer and the observed? Such a theoretical framework
was an ideal approach to theatre and film, both of which are based on the act
of watching and the interaction of performer and spectator.
Following the societal trends, the earliest forces in women’s theatre were
directed largely at providing greater opportunities for women’s voices to be
heard in the theatre. Prior to the sixties the number of women playwrights
whose work received major productions could literally be counted on one
hand. In the postwar years this sorority was limited almost entirely to Lillian
Hellman and Lorraine Hansberry. While the Off-Off Broadway movement had
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provided a forum for a significant number of plays by women, and some of
these, notably the plays of Megan Terry and Maria Irene Fornés, achieved a
recognized place in American drama and significant productions OffBroadway and in regional and university theatres, none of them was ever
accorded a Broadway production or mainstream recognition.
A small group of women playwrights began to emerge in the seventies who
were able to achieve a degree of success in the mainstream commercial
theatre. The first was Tina Howe, whose Absurdist-inflected and sometimes
fantastical plays served as a critique of American culture and mores. Her
greatest successes came in the eighties with Painting Churches (1983), Coastal
Disturbances (1986), and Approaching Zanzibar (1989), which all dealt in
various ways with issues of love and loss. Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart
(1981), the first of several of her plays in the Southern gothic tradition, was
the first play ever to win the Pulitzer Prize prior to a Broadway production.
Marsha Norman also received a Pulitzer Prize for ’night, Mother (1983), a
wrenching play about a mother and daughter and the daughter’s suicide.
Wendy Wasserstein has been the most successful of the mainstream women
playwrights, in part because of her strong characters and fierce wit, and in
part because thematically her plays often confront the dilemma faced by
many women caught between feminist aspirations and the pressures and
appeal of tradition. Her plays such as Uncommon Women and Others (1977)
and the Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning The Heidi Chronicles (1989) dealt
with women of the baby-boom generation, with one foot in the world of their
mothers and the traditions of the Eisenhower or even prewar years and the
other in the feminist ideals of the post seventies. The very things that have
made her one of the few commercially viable playwrights of the eighties and
nineties – a strong comic sensibility, appealing characters that are derived
from social archetypes, easily digestible discussions of contemporary problems – have also brought her condemnation. She has been attacked for many
of the same reasons as Neil Simon; critics belittle her seemingly superficial
treatment of contemporary society and apparently glib humor. Yet like Simon,
she has found an audience which sees in the inevitably simplified world of her
plays the complexities of their own lives.
Almost all the women playwrights have suffered to some degree or other
at the hands of male critics and producers because of their altered dramatic
emphases. The more traditional women playwrights tend to structure their
plays around the emotional relationship of characters and place a greater
emphasis on mood and language (though precedents can certainly be found
in Williams and Inge); the more experimental, including Fornés, Terry, Rosalyn
Drexler, and Adrienne Kennedy, have on occasion abandoned Aristotelian
structure, discursive language, and even Cartesian time and space. While
such strategies are not solely the provenance of women playwrights, they
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have often baffled male-dominated critiques and rendered some of these
writers and their plays virtually invisible. In response, some of these playwrights have abandoned major theatre centers altogether. Jo Ann Schmidman
founded the Omaha Magic Theatre in 1968, and since 1974 Megan Terry has
been a playwright in residence there.
Some of the energy of the Off-Off Broadway movement of the sixties has
been regenerated by the feminist theatres of the late eighties and nineties.
Beginning in the wake of the women’s liberation movement of the early seventies, radical feminist theatre groups have surfaced around the country. Mostly
separatist organizations, their goal has been the restructuring of women’s
roles in society through a theatre that allowed women to see their lives validated onstage and which raised questions of power and cultural hegemony.
To some extent they turned to Brechtian techniques and collective structures
to try to free themselves from what has been perceived as a male hierarchical structure. Of those early groups, only a few such as Spiderwoman Theatre,
a Native American theatre company, survive. But in the eighties in New York,
an active lesbian-feminist theatre began to emerge. Most successful among
these has been Split Britches, founded in 1981 by Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw,
and Deborah Margolin at WOW (Women’s One World) Café. Their productions
confront contemporary social and political issues, but do so by appropriating
the vocabulary, style, and content of popular culture to create plays that are
both surreal and comic. WOW also gave birth to the performance art of Holly
Hughes who has also written for Split Britches and whose autobiographical
monologues owe something to the verbal riffs of Sam Shepard, but are also
among the more powerful examples of personal writing in the last decade.
And it gave rise to the campy performances of the Five Lesbian Brothers,
whose sendups of popular culture play with the simultaneous presence and
invisibility of lesbians in American society.
Aspects of feminist and African American theatre have been combined in
the works of Suzan-Lori Parks in the nineties. Her plays deal in part with
themes of racism and feminism, yet they do so by ransacking history and
dragging it onto the stage for radical re-evaluation. In The America Play (1990),
for instance, a black man plays Abraham Lincoln in a side-show setting, allowing paying customers to re-enact the assassination over and over. Parks’s discursive and repetitive narrative frameworks and poetic and jazz-like language,
which emphasize variations and transformations on a theme rather than
linear story-telling, work well for an approach to history that suggests that
history is constantly warped and reshaped by the point of view of the viewer
and the story-teller. Yet at the core of Parks’s plays are characters who long
for meaning within an often incomprehensible world and for human connection in a world of loneliness.
Gay theatre underwent a similar evolution. Gay playwrights such as
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Williams, Inge, and Albee had virtually dominated postwar theatre, but the
homosexual themes in their plays were either masked or non-existent. But the
Off-Off Broadway movement, Caffe Cino in particular, gave voice to many
openly gay playwrights who placed homosexual characters and themes in
their plays and gloried in camp sensibility. In a famous 1964 essay, Susan
Sontag explored and defined the world of camp. “To perceive Camp in objects
and persons,” she explained, “is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is
the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” She
went on to observe: “Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of
taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most
refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s
sex” (Against Interpretation, 281). Furthermore, camp emphasized “texture,
sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content” (280). The plays of H.M.
Koutoukas with their combination of “whimsy, speed, camp and insanity”
(Poland and Mailman, The Off-Off Broadway Book, xvii), Robert Patrick,
William M. Hoffman, and Lanford Wilson fit within this definition. Wilson’s The
Madness of Lady Bright (1964), about an aging “screaming preening queen,”
became the first Off-Off Broadway hit. This sensibility was developed in all its
outrageousness in the work of John Vaccaro and the Play-House of the
Ridiculous and the plays of Ron Tavel. Flouting sexual and social norms, as
well as any semblance of dramatic structure or decorum, these plays outraged and provoked. The Play-House of the Ridiculous eventually dissolved,
but an offshoot, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, headed by actor Charles
Ludlam, eventually transformed from a peripatetic group operating on the
perverse edges of the theatrical scene to a respectable company of actors
creating travesties of nineteenth-century theatre with a gay and camp sensibility, while elevating the well-made play and other nineteenth-century
forms to the sublime. Ludlam’s transvestite portrayal of Marguerite Gauthier
in Camille, his adaptation of Dumas fils’ The Lady of the Camellias, is generally
acknowledged as a piece of tour de force acting, while the production remarkably walked an aesthetic tightrope between farce and pathos.
Gay theatre, meanwhile, began to find more mainstream outlets with Mart
Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), which used the context of a party to
explore the private loves, longings, emotions and frustrations of a group of
gay men. Though in retrospect, the play is stereotypical and even offensive in
its depictions of character types, and while there was a somewhat peep-show
atmosphere – some straight spectators came to get a view of gay life, much as
they did to see the nude scene in Hair – it was nonetheless a breakthrough
that began to introduce straight audiences to homosexuals as individuals. It
also provided gay spectators with gay-created characters – not the humorous
or pathetic stereotypes more typical of the mainstream theatre. Just as the
Vietnam War aroused many theatre artists into a politically oriented theatre,
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the Stonewall Riot of 1969 – in which patrons of a gay bar in Greenwich Village
actively resisted a police raid, thereby setting off a chain reaction of activism
leading to rapidly increased visibility and political presence by gays – was a
catalyst in the evolution of gay drama. The number of plays and productions
with gay characters and themes increased exponentially, and the plays
addressed not only the emotional lives of characters but took on political and
social issues. By 1983, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy was able to
combine elements of sitcom, camp, and tragic irony to win a Tony.
The AIDS epidemic galvanized writers and transformed gay theatre. Just as
the disease itself served as a lightning rod for a range of political and social
responses to homosexuality both within as well as outside the gay community, the theatre now reflected everything from political-action plays to Arthur
Miller-like plays of moral and social conscience. Plays such as Larry Kramer’s
The Normal Heart and William M. Hoffman’s As Is attacked the mainstream
society for its perceived silence and indifference, while trying to come to
terms with the enormity of the toll the plague was taking on not only the gay
community but society as a whole. The power and success of several of these
plays often lay more in their message and passion, which coincided with the
mood of the time and helped to transform societal perceptions, than in their
dramaturgical excellence. Kramer, through his organization ActUp, brought
theatricality to social and political action, somewhat as Abbie Hoffman and
the “yippies” had done in the early seventies. Borrowing techniques from guerilla theatre, activists would disrupt social, cultural, and political events to
achieve publicity – often on television news – while sending a strong message.
Paula Vogel’s Baltimore Waltz (1992), however, typified an emerging trend
in the nineties toward plays of grief and rage that, by functioning on an allegorical or metaphorical level, removed themselves from the specifics of newspaper headlines and allowed audiences to place the tragedy in a larger
historical and, importantly, emotional framework. Tony Kushner’s Angels in
America, more than any other play of the period, was generally regarded as
transcending the narrow confines of a single audience or subject while at the
same time embodying the themes and ideas of much gay theatre from the previous three decades. Divided into two parts, Millennium Approaches and
Perestroika, each close to four hours long, the play employed an epic structure to observe American society at the end of the twentieth century. With its
sweeping overview of history, politics, and culture placed within an apocalyptic yet optimistic vision, and couched in surprising touches of humor, the play
cut across lines of gender, sexual preference, and even race to reach a broad
audience.
Angels in America has had numerous successful productions at resident
theatres across the country as well as an acclaimed London production, and
won the Pulitzer Prize. The New York production, directed by George C. Wolfe
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of the New York Shakespeare Festival, received generally glowing reviews as
well as several Tony Awards, yet indicative of the state of commercial theatre
in the early nineties, the high cost of producing and running the show combined with less than capacity audiences after the first few months led to a relatively short run. The Broadway theatre of the late twentieth century has had
difficulty sustaining dramatic fare.
The sense of loss and existential despair that typified so many of the plays
of the fifties and sixties, and the concurrent demise of language as a tool for
communication, had transformed over the subsequent decades into desire
for human contact and communication and a search for meaning in an often
hostile or uncaring world. Loss was no longer vague or recondite in American
society: the American dream had been shattered in Vietnam – an inexplicable
war that we could not win – and in Watergate where political corruption led
to the first presidential resignation in the nation’s history; racism, which had
briefly appeared solvable, re-emerged as a seemingly incurable cancer eating
away at society; materialism, which had been an ever present factor in
American society, though always masked beneath the surface of democratic
ideals, emerged as a primary social force in the Reagan years; and the AIDS
epidemic brought fears and prejudices to the forefront of society while decimating a portion of that society. Perhaps in response to these changes the
family, at least in its traditional and historical configuration, dissolved as a
workable or relevant metaphor for the drama. Angels in America, seen in this
context, became a paradigm of fin de siècle American drama. A sprawling
work, it encompassed history, religion, sexuality, and millennial and apocalyptic visions as each of the characters struggled to find or maintain a human
relationship. This struggle for human contact, support, and love emerged as
the primary concern of a range of plays.
While it is no longer possible in the last decade of the twentieth century for
a single dramatic voice to speak for the cacophony of voices that is the United
States, the playwright who may come closest, the one playwright who has a
chance of standing in that line of descent from Eugene O’Neill, is August
Wilson. Writing in 1997, social and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
declared that Wilson “is probably the most celebrated American playwright
now writing and is certainly the most accomplished black playwright in this
nation’s history” (“The Chitlin Circuit,” 44). Starting with Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom (1982) and continuing with such plays as Fences (1983; Pulitzer Prize
and Tony Award 1987), and The Piano Lesson (1989; Pulitzer Prize 1990),
Wilson has been creating a chronicle of the African American life. While the
characters, locales, situations, and narratives of these plays are drawn specifically from the African American experience, thematically and emotionally
they have transcended the narrow confines of identity politics. Wilson has
drawn upon the strengths of American drama – the microcosm of the family,
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fully-dimensional characters with whom an audience can empathize, vernacular language that rises to poetry, touches of symbolism and even magic
realism, and an underlying optimism. Nonetheless, Wilson has thrown himself
into the midst of the debate on identity politics. He has become a passionate
advocate for black-run theatres and has stated unequivocally that black plays
should be directed only by black directors and that black actors should act
only in specifically black roles by black playwrights. Black actors should not,
he argues, play in Shakespeare or Chekhov. Few artists of any race fully
support such absolutist views and some have pointed to the contradictions
raised by Wilson’s own production record. Nonetheless, many are in agreement with Wilson’s fundamental point that foundation support for color-blind
casting and for supporting African American plays in the repertoires of
regional theatres, however well intentioned, have undermined the development of African American theatres by creating an environment of tokenism
and draining funds that might be used for the development of new theatres,
audiences, and artists.
Conclusion
At the start of the twentieth century, American theatre was centered in a group
of magnificent rococo buildings on Forty-second Street near Times Square in
New York City, and most cities of any size had at least one theatre that housed
either road companies emanating from Broadway or resident companies that
would provide the context for productions by touring stars. Theatre was a
business and as such it was controlled almost exclusively by two organizations: the so-called Syndicate and the upstart Shubert Brothers. Movies were
a new gimmick confined to nickelodeons and as a curiosity in vaudeville
shows. As the millennium approaches, to borrow Kushner’s title, there are
some startling echoes. Despite regular predictions about the imminent death
of theatre, it continues to exist, if not exactly thrive. The Syndicate is gone, but
the Shubert Organization remains the largest single theatre owner in the
country, while its philanthropic arm, the Shubert Foundation, is the largest
single supporter of not-for-profit theatre. The theatres along Forty-second
Street which had, over the decades, devolved into movie houses, burlesque
houses, pornography shops, and boarded-up decaying relics, are being transformed back into legitimate theatres. Interestingly, one of the largest stimuli
for the resurgence is the Disney Corporation, which has discovered that live
theatre is capable of producing huge profits, and has rapidly become one of
the major producers of live theatre in the country. (In a very real sense, Disney
has been one of the major producers of live theatre since the mid-fifties: its
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theme parks produce a wide variety of live entertainment, and the parks as a
whole are seen by many cultural observers as a form of theatre. Since the early
nineties, however, Disney has moved into legitimate theatres with musicals
such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King adapted, interestingly, from its
own animated movies.) Another player in the revitalization is a Canadian producing company, Livent, originally headed by producer Garth Drabinsky, who
believes that financially independent theatre today depends upon providing
huge spectacles for large audiences. Livent has developed a series of 1,500 to
2,000-seat theatres, including a renovation of two of the Forty-second Street
houses, and brings in touring large-scale shows.
Serious drama may have little place on contemporary Broadway anymore,
but new Off-Broadway theatres are being built for the first time in years to
house the large number of productions that are vying for space. Meanwhile,
the regional theatres continue to be a major source of original productions
and classic theatre, although the ever decreasing public subsidy is threatening the ability of many of these theatres to survive or to produce original contributions. Playwrights, almost none of whom can make an adequate living
writing solely for the theatre, have been writing for film and television. While
this is hardly a new phenomenon – writers have been devoured by Hollywood
almost from the moment moving pictures first “talked” – critics have acknowledged an increasing quality in much television drama. The sort of serious dramatic writing that once was reserved for the stage now shows up more often
on television’s police and hospital series. Writers for these programs have
commented on the greater freedom to develop characters over time and the
ability to explore these characters in a variety of situations in ways that the
finite shape of a play does not allow.
The fifties was a decade of absolutes: men had jobs while women were
housewives; the world was divided into “free” and Communist; one was a
Republican or a Democrat, and so on. Shades of gray were suspect. Similarly,
theatre was divided into drama, comedy, and musicals; other performance
categories included opera and ballet. Popular entertainments such as the
circus were not seriously considered as performance by most audiences. But
just as the Civil Rights, women’s, and gay movements, the counterculture life
styles, and the avant-garde all worked to break down barriers and alter
assumptions about life and art, theatrical categories evaporated as well.
Theatre became performance and included under its umbrella traditional and
popular forms, rituals, paratheatrical activities, and even the performative
aspects of daily life. Today, many presentations defy simple categorization,
training incorporates a wide range of disciplines, and artists work in several
genres. On the other hand, identity politics still informs the creation and producing of many theatres and defines the habits of particular audiences.
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A great unknown for the future of theatre is the realm referred to as “cyberspace” – the world of computers, virtual reality, and digital communication.
Some performance artists such as Laurie Anderson and George Coates have
created performance pieces for the World Wide Web that allow “spectators”
sitting at their computer terminals to interact with the work of art. There have
been primitive attempts at three-dimensional scenery using special goggles
and computer-enhanced images. While it seems unlikely that so-called virtual
theatre or the gimmickry and wizardry of contemporary technology in and of
itself will replace or even seriously alter live theatre, the new technologies are
rapidly and subtly transforming the way in which we view and understand the
world. Just as perspective painting and scientific thought transformed the art
and theatre of the Renaissance, and relativity and quantum physics affected
twentieth-century art and theatre, so too will the new digital and electronic
technologies transform theatre for the next centuries through the alteration
of perceptions in ways that cannot be predicted or even understood.
Spectacle, which has had a central place in American theatre dating back
at least to the proto-musical pageant known as The Black Crook in 1866, is still
to be found in Broadway musicals, especially the British imports of Andrew
Lloyd Webber such as Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard. But by the
mid-nineties, the taste for such spectacle theatre seemed to be declining on
Broadway. It found its way instead into the ever increasing technical extravaganzas of Las Vegas, into the circus, and, as mentioned, into rock concerts.
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, for instance, which bills itself as
“the greatest show on Earth,” has more resemblance to a Las Vegas show than
to a traditional nineteenth-century circus. Cirque du Soleil, a Canadian
“circus” that employs no animals, has, in fact, found a permanent home in Las
Vegas. Its success derives from grafting spectacle and non-verbal narrative
onto traditional variety entertainments, all done with consummate showmanship. Meanwhile, the presidential nominating conventions of the Republican
and Democratic parties have borrowed heavily from the technology of rock
concerts to provide a theatrical spectacle that is more about impressing a
television audience than it is about carrying out the rituals of democracy.
These conventions that would undoubtedly seem baffling to a Truman,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Johnson are perfectly comprehensible to a public
familiar with Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Rolling Stones, and the theatrical
entertainments of Superbowl halftime shows. Just as historians who study the
Renaissance theatre often pay more attention to the court masques, royal
entries, public executions, and state pageants than to the written drama of the
period, it may be that future historians will find the paratheatrical entertainments of American culture in the second half of the twentieth century – sporting events, rock concerts, urban street fairs, theme parks, restored historical
villages, shopping malls, political campaign rallies and conventions, and Las
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Vegas and its clones – more representative of theatre than the conventional
drama or musical.
It is clear at the end of the twentieth century that the theatre is far from
dead. Statistics suggest a stubborn vitality all across the country. Theatre
training programs continue to have ample numbers of applicants; literary
offices are swamped with submissions of new plays; almost every city of any
size has at least one theatre. What has changed is theatre’s place within the
society and the means of production. Mainstream theatre is rarely casual
entertainment any more. The large commercial theatres and the “official”
theatres – the urban or state arts centers – are run by entertainment conglomerates or corporate boards. They have become showcases for culture or
tourist destinations. Smaller venues are dedicated to political or artistic
agendas aimed at generally narrow but supportive audiences. Those forms
that have historically constituted popular theatre have been largely subsumed by television, film, popular music, and perhaps by computers and the
Internet. There is a potential danger in this last development. The popular
theatre has always been the training ground for performers and writers.
Learning to engage an audience, interact with it, and communicate with it is
crucial for the continuation of a vital theatre. The loss of that venue will mean
the loss of new generations of performers with adequate experience in the
give and take of live theatre. Stand-up comedy, one of the last vestiges of
variety entertainment, provides some of that experience, but it is not the
same as the complex interactions of a narrative structure and several actors.
The human desire for live performance – what Aristotle understood as a
human inclination to mimic – will keep theatre alive in the future as it has in
the past. But the electronic media are a new factor which makes the future
even more unpredictable than ever.
Notes
1 For economic and production figures, see Baumol and Bowen, Performing Arts – The
Economic Dilemma, and Moore, The Economics of the American Theater.
2 Sievers, Freud on Broadway.
3 See Peter Stone, “Why Fill the Stage if the Seats Are Empty?” New York Times, 10
January 1988: A15.
4 See Bosley Crowther’s review of The Wild One in the New York Times, 31 December
1953.
5 See Ginsberg’s “Prologue” in Beat Culture and the New America 1950–1965, ed.
Phillips.
6 See Kirby, “The Structure of Performance,” in A Formalist Theatre, 28–29ff.
7 Ginsberg interview on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 31 January
1993.
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8 See Brustein’s review of The Connection, The New Republic, 28 September 1959: 30.
9 The Tulane Drama Review initially began as the Carleton Drama Review under
Robert Corrigan. In 1968 it moved to New York University and became known as
The Drama Review.
10 Recounted by Schechner in “Guerilla Theatre,” The Drama Review 14, 3 (T47, 1970):
165.
Bibliography: American Theatre in Context: 1945–Present
While there was once a strong niche in book publishing for theatre history and dramatic literature, the market has shrunk considerably in recent decades. University and
small presses have been prolific in areas such as poststructuralist theory and feminist
and gay studies, but traditional narrative or analytical histories are less common.
There has, however, been a proliferation of journals devoted to aspects of theatre, and
any study of contemporary American theatre must look to these as well as newspapers
and mainstream periodicals. For the daily and weekly chronicling of events primary
sources are the New York Times, the Village Voice, Variety, Backstage, InTheatre (which
replaced TheatreWeek), and Time Out. The journals and newsletters of professional
organizations such as The Dramatists Guild and the Society of Stage Directors and
Choreographers (SSD&C) are especially helpful for both current events and long-term
issues. The most useful journals and serials include: American Theatre; The Drama
Review (formerly Tulane Drama Review – a selected collection of essays can be found
in McNamara’s and Dolan’s The Drama Review: Thirty Years of Commentary on the
Avant-Garde); Performing Arts Journal; Theater (formerly Yale Theater); Theatre Crafts;
Theatre Forum; and Theatre Journal (formerly Educational Theatre Journal ). For documenting theatre seasons the best source is The Best Plays series. John Degen in
Chapter 4 provides a lengthy guide to American musical theatre, which should be consulted for those interested in that topic.
The American theatre, of course, must be seen in the cultural history of its time.
There are many popular books surveying individual decades, such as Halberstam’s
The Fifties. A superb history of the period 1945–47 is Patterson’s Grand Expectations.
General histories that were of particular use in writing this chapter were Gitlin, The
Sixties; Miller and Nowak, The Fifties; and Morgan and Wynn, America’s Century. Studies
of particular aspects of the postwar society include Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of
Capitalism; Luce, The Ideas of Henry Luce; Brown, Life Against Death; Galbraith, The
Affluent Society; Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd; and Whyte, The Organization Man.
The intellectual atmosphere and the literary and cultural debates of the era are
addressed particularly well in the Partisan Review, especially the issue of May–June
1952. For theoretical and analytical underpinnings of the era see Fiedler, Love and
Death in the American Novel; Huyssen, After the Great Divide; Reische, The Performing
Arts in America; Sontag, Against Interpretation; and Trilling, Beyond Culture. The emergence of the Beat Generation and the counterculture are documented in Banes,
Greenwich Village 1963; Holmes, “This Is the Beat Generation”; Knight and Knight, The
Beat Vision; Kornbluth, Notes from the New Underground; Melville, Communes in the
Counter Culture; Phillips, Beat Culture and the New America 1950–1965; and Starr,
Cultural Politics.
Placing postwar theatre in context requires an understanding of related arts and
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media, including the visual arts, literature, dance, music, film, and television. The
history and theory of postwar visual art could, of course, fill many shelves. Those I
found particularly useful include: Duberman, Black Mountain; Frascina, Pollock and
After ; Greenberg, Art and Culture; Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and
Performance; Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; Kaprow, Assemblage,
Environments, and Happenings, and “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”; Motherwell, The
Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell; Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New; Seitz, The
Art of Assemblage; Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors and Off the Wall. For the dance
world see Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers; Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance;
Copeland and Cohen, What Is Dance?. Popular music is dealt with in Goldstein, The
Poetry of Rock, and Marcus, Ranters & Crowd Pleasers. Two classic books on television
are Barnouw, Tube of Plenty; and Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. The classic
study of media, of course, is McLuhan, Understanding Media. A broad look at the trends
in performance across disciplines can be seen by reading the catalogues of the Next
Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from 1983 on. Since the early eighties
books on postmodernism have been proliferating. Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas is
by now a classic; the best collection of essential sources can be found in Docherty,
Postmodernism.
General histories and overviews of theatre of the period include: Atkinson,
Broadway; Berkowitz, New Broadways; Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth
Century American Drama; Cohn, New American Dramatists; Engel, The American
Musical Theatre; Gottfried, Broadway Musicals; Kernan, The Modern American Theatre;
Harris, Broadway; Meserve, Discussions of Modern American Drama; and Taubman, The
Making of the American Theatre.
Useful collections of theory and criticism are Bentley, The Theatre of Commitment
and The Theatre of War ; Brustein, The Third Theatre; Lahr, Astonish Me; Meserve,
Discussions of Modern American Drama; Reinelt and Roach, Critical Theory and
Performance; and Rogoff, Theatre Is Not Safe.
The economics of the theatre are covered most thoroughly in Baumol and Bowen,
Performing Arts; Moore, The Economics of the American Theater ; Poggi, Theater in
America; and the Rockefeller Panel Report, The Performing Arts. A more narrative look
at commercial production can be found in Goldman, The Season.
Alternative theatre movements (see also sources in Carlson, Chapter 2, “Alternative
Theatre” ) provide great insight into theatre and culture, because they reveal the status
quo through the reactions against it. The best studies of aspects of the avant-garde are
addressed in Battcock and Nickas, The Art of Performance; Kirby, A Formalist Theatre
and Happenings; Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means; Sayre, The Object of
Performance, while the Off- and Off-Off Broadway movements are covered in Auerbach,
Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater ; Cordell and Matson, The OffBroadway Theatre; Little, Off-Broadway; Orzel and Smith, Eight Plays from Off-Off
Broadway; Poland and Mailman, The Off-Off Broadway Book; Sainer, The Radical
Theatre Notebook; Schevill, Break Out! In Search of New Theatrical Environments; Shank,
American Alternative Theatre; and Smith, More Plays from Off-Off Broadway.
Many individual artists and groups, of course, are covered extensively in the journals mentioned above. Among book-length studies see Beck, The Life of the Theatre;
Biner, The Living Theatre; Blumenthal, Joseph Chaikin; Cage, Silence; Brecht, The
Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson; Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor; Davy, Richard
Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre; Foreman, Unbalancing Acts; Holmberg,
The Theatre of Robert Wilson; Kostelanetz, John Cage (Ex)plain(ed); Malina, The
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Diaries of Judith Malina 1947–1957; Pasolli, A Book on the Open Theatre; Savran, The
Wooster Group 1975–1985; Schechner, Dionysus in ’69 and Environmental Theater. and
Tytell, The Living Theatre. Of the great amount written about black theatre I found the
following most useful: Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre; Gates, Jr.,
“The Chitlin Circuit”; Hill, The Theatre of Black Americans; Mitchell, Black Drama. The
sources on women’s theatre and feminist theory are expanding rapidly. Ones I found
particularly useful were Case, Feminism and Theatre and Performing Feminisms;
Champagne, Out from Under ; and Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic.
2
A Changing Theatre: Broadway
to the Regions
Broadway
Laurence Maslon
Introduction
The object that stands outside the circle usually casts the longest shadow
across it. To understand the ever increasingly complicated world of Broadway
in the last half of this century, one only has to look at a single event on the
evening – midnight to be exact – of 6 April 1947 when, at the Waldorf Astoria,
the American Theatre Wing paid tribute to its former executive director,
Antoinette Perry, who had died the previous year. The tribute came in the
form of awards given for achievements on Broadway in that current season –
and they would be called, in respect for Ms. Perry, the Tony Awards.
The evening was a casual affair, by contemporary standards. There were no
ranks of nominees from which a winner suspensefully emerged; there were no
“bests” – just outstanding achievements; there was some brief entertainment
courtesy of several musicals then running, plus performers such as Frank Fay,
Ethel Waters, and newcomer David Wayne; the list of awards was broadcast
at midnight for fifteen minutes on a local radio station.1
What was significant that night is that despite the almost coyly modest
affair, the Tony Awards – and the larger enterprise they became – were
Broadway’s first attempt to model itself after another entertainment industry
– the movies – and eventually by the fifties, the selection and presentation of
the awards mirrored those of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Science’s Oscar presentations almost exactly. The television broadcast of the
Tony Awards became the apogee of the theatrical season (and occasionally
was more provocative than the season itself ) and the last, best chance for
Broadway to reach a national audience. By replicating the format and the publicity of the film industry with the Tony Awards, Broadway had silently conceded its role as the dominant center for creative achievement in the
performing arts.
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Broadway had survived the advent of Hollywood, the exodus of creative
forces moving west, the raids on the talent pool. But, from 1950 on, the challenges were more insidious and more numerous. There were artistic factors,
such as the freedom from commercial pressure that could be discovered in
the growing Off-Broadway scene; political factors, such as the decay of urban
New York in the sixties and seventies; geographic factors, such as the rise of
suburbia after the Second World War and the growth of competitive regional
theatre outside the New York area; and, of course, technological challenges,
such as the rise of television (first broadcast, then cable) and advances in
motion picture technology. Even the advent of the credit card had its effect.
Broadway had to struggle to find an identity, let alone reclaim a prominence,
in an increasingly obstreperous performance culture.
The 1950s: TV and Sympathy
“The stage is a place for ideas, for philosophies, for the most intense discussion of man’s fate,” wrote Arthur Miller in 1951 (quoted in Atkinson, Broadway,
442). For him – and for Tennessee Williams – that stage was to be found on
Broadway. Following on an impressive tradition of serious American drama
between the wars, Miller and Williams set the terms of the debate for
American drama in the fifties and, in many ways, far, far beyond.
Williams’s string of accomplishments – The Rose Tattoo (1950), Camino
Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), all
directed by Elia Kazan, who brought out the best in Williams and Miller – was
perfectly in tune with the psychological and sexual issues that postwar audiences were willing to explore (for a discussion of Williams and other playwrights of this period, see Chapter 3). Williams’s quest for psychological
acuity, sexual frankness, and universal truth in the portrayal of the most
neglected of God’s creatures provided a model for other playwrights, including William Inge, whose output in the fifties was impressive by any standard,
beginning with Come Back, Little Sheba in 1950, followed by Bus Stop, Picnic,
and, to a lesser degree, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. With its fragile frankness, Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953) – hardly the kind of play
that would shock audiences today, let alone engage them – became a major
success of the decade. Even this gentle exploration of homosexuality and
coming of age was too much for Hollywood to bear; the film version deleted
the drama’s central conflict.
Arthur Miller – the embodiment of the serious dramatist – was the decade’s
playwright of ideas and he succeeded admirably with The Crucible (1953), his
view of the Salem witch trials through the prism of the McCarthy hearings.
The Crucible had a respectable run (197 performances) on Broadway, tri-
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1. Caricatures of (left to right) Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Miller, major
figures in the Broadway theatre of the 1950s. Illustration by Laurence Maslon.
umphed Off-Broadway four seasons later for 571 performances, became a
staple for regional theatres after the seventies, and eventually a Hollywood
movie in 1996.
However, these were by no means the only serious dramas. Inherit the Wind
(1955), a lightly fictionalized version of the Scopes “monkey” trial, by Jerome
Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, was a significant work (mounted first at Margo
Jones’s theatre in Dallas): like The Crucible, it provided its own reading of the
intellectual and moral retrogression of the blacklisting period. There was
some criticism about its synthetic quality, but a star performance by Paul
Muni, making his first Broadway appearance in almost a quarter of a century,
helped give it a long and successful history in film and revivals.
In a way, the most impressive serious play of the decade was The Diary of
Anne Frank (1955), adapted by the screenwriting husband-and-wife team of
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from Anne Frank’s Diary of A Young Girl.
Ruth Gordon, the actress and wife of the play’s director, Garson Kanin, begged
him not to do the play, insisting that audiences would be unwilling to watch
such a painful work. But it took Broadway by storm, ran for two years, won
every award possible, and eventually played to stunned audiences across
Europe.
1956 brought two very different and important dramas to Broadway:
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Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey
Into Night. Godot remains, to this day, the only Broadway presentation of
Beckett’s work. Long Day’s Journey Into Night had its first performance in
Stockholm, but its eagerly awaited Broadway debut, with Fredric March and
Florence Eldridge and directed by José Quintero, met and exceeded all expectations. It ran for over a year, won the Pulitzer, made a star out of Jason
Robards, Jr., and paved the way for the production of two more posthumous
O’Neill plays – A Moon for the Misbegotten and A Touch of the Poet.
In 1959, Kenneth Tynan wrote, “There is only one trend in the Broadway
theater and its name is Kazan” (quoted in Fehl, On Broadway, 334). Moving
back and forth from Broadway to Hollywood, with such films as On the
Waterfront and the adaptation of Streetcar, Kazan had a success and fluidity
that no other director has matched. He was brilliant in selecting and working
on scripts by major writers of the era – Williams, Inge, Miller – and in integrating and recognizing the work of the actors who came from The Actors Studio.
There were others of similar drive and integrity, like producer Kermit
Bloomgarden. Salesman made his career, but he followed it with Anne Frank,
The Crucible, and such varied musicals as The Most Happy Fella and The Music
Man, which, of all shows, several prominent directors and performers were
unwilling to take on. Bloomgarden was from the old school of producing,
trained in the business, willing to take chances, almost single-handedly, on a
difficult project.
Critics and theatregoers would invoke the names of Williams, Miller, and
Kazan for decades to come, while lamenting the demise of serious drama, the
kind of play where audience members would be shaken and exalted by seeing
something never discussed, played out and examined on stage before. The
public certainly was not getting that kind of experience from Hollywood or
television (and in the years to come, they would not be getting it from
Broadway any more either), but in the fifties, because of these artists,
Broadway was a forum for national debate.
Comedy on Broadway, however, was almost totally obscured by these
achievements. The social satire produced between the wars was almost
impossible to find. Even George S. Kaufman’s one hit during the decade, The
Solid Gold Cadillac, written with Howard Teichmann, was less a satire on Wall
Street than an excuse for a fine comic performance by Josephine Hull. Sex was
the dominant theme in comedy, but was often so coyly presented as to give a
minimum of offense. In that respect, George Axelrod’s The Seven Year Itch (a
middle-aged man’s flirtations with a beautiful neighbor when his wife is out of
town) was paradigmatic. Other hits (The Tunnel of Love; The Marriage-GoRound; Goodbye, Charlie; Never Too Late; and Take Her She’s Mine) continued
the trend into the sixties. Later, television was able to absorb such mildly titillating topics and make them the essence of its daily fare.
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For many, the loss of legitimate comedy was more than compensated for
by the pizazz and imagination of musical comedy. The fifties were an exhilarating and transitional time with the widest variety of musical styles existing
simultaneously. Here, Rodgers and Hammerstein were as dominant in their
field as Miller and Williams were in theirs. They ushered in the decade with a
resounding success in The King and I, a work which displayed their gift for
integrating story, songs, dance, and character. It became the model for the
next generation of musical theatre artists.
As Rodgers and Hammerstein turned unsuccessfully to more serious subjects, the show for the proverbial “tired businessman” prospered with such
gifted concoctions as Can-Can, Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game, and Damn
Yankees, which created or consolidated the reputations of a new generation
of artists: dancer Gwen Verdon, director-choreographer Bob Fosse, writers
Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and producer Harold Prince. But in 1956,
the unlikely musicalization of a 1912 social critique by Bernard Shaw changed
the face of the Broadway musical.
Several composers had turned down the task of musicalizing Pygmalion,
but Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe accepted the assignment and, under
the skilled direction of Moss Hart, the resulting show My Fair Lady not only
set a standard for elegance in musical theatre, but created a work which ran
for a then-record-breaking 2,717 performances.
Although Rosalind Russell, a non-singer, had led Wonderful Town four
seasons earlier, it was Rex Harrison’s musical debut as Henry Higgins that
changed producers’ perceptions about the kind of actors who could front a
musical; from then on, actors as well as musical performers starred in shows.
The very improbability of the Shavian source material proved more of an
incentive than a warning – the next twenty years would see musical adaptations of the most improbable material. Nevertheless, it was the increasing
success of original cast recordings of Broadway musicals that brought in the
CBS corporation as a major backer of My Fair Lady. The Columbia LP became
a recording phenomenon and is now the third longest-selling recording of all
time, in any category.2 Hereafter, record companies and networks were eager
to underwrite one of the greatest gambles in modern entertainment – a
Broadway musical. With its cast album, successful tours and London production, plus a record-breaking movie sale, My Fair Lady made over $800 million
(see Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 134), proving for this period the accuracy
of Robert Anderson’s axiom that “in the theatre, you can’t make a living, but
you can make a killing.”
Because of the success of book musicals, such as My Fair Lady, the revue
became a major casualty of changing theatrical tastes. The engine of
Broadway in the twenties and thirties, it had little gas in it by mid-decade. The
apparent death of the revue was also abetted by the advent and advance of
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television. In the fifties, television had a tangled relationship with Broadway.
As an industry, it came of age in the late forties in Manhattan, thus giving it
easy access to Broadway artists. But, in TV’s infancy, it was deemed beneath
the dignity of Broadway stars, and became the subject of mockery in musicals
like Johnny Mercer’s Top Banana, starring Phil Silvers (who would forsake
Broadway after the 1951 show to become a TV star) and the hit comedy,
Anniversary Waltz, where a television set was smashed nightly to the amusement of the audience. But gradually theatrical producers saw the appeal of the
new medium and the number of prospective ticket buyers it could bring in.
Television’s early success with variety spectaculars (or “specials”) quickly
cannibalized the revue talent of comedians, singers, and dancers. Sid Caesar
entertained Broadway audiences for a season in 1949 in Make Mine Manhattan;
by 1954, he was reaching millions nationwide on Your Show of Shows.
Television was not only dependent on Broadway for talent, it drew on the
Great White Way for a kind of cultural imprimatur. As a way of bolstering its
own derided integrity, TV invoked the glamor of the legitimate stage for many
of its programs, such as Texaco Star Theater, All-Star Revue, Broadway
Jamboree, Broadway Open House, even Stage Show, a variety series produced
by Jackie Gleason, where the show opened with a camera-eye-view of a spectator getting out of a limo, entering a theatre, walking down the aisle, grabbing
a program, and sitting in a fifth-row aisle seat (see Brooks and Marsh, The
Complete Directory of Prime Time Network TV Shows, 787). The most successful of these was Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town, soon to be named after the
Broadway columnist who gave Broadway shows a huge amount of publicity;
an extended tribute to Lerner and Loewe in 1961 included a twenty-minute
clip of their then-ailing new show Camelot which, overnight, reversed its fortunes forever after. Television thus, for a while, repaid its debt to theatre.
Dramatic work came out of television, too, as it appropriated the serious
side of Broadway with shows like Kraft Television Theater, Philco/Goodyear TV
Playhouse, and most famously Playhouse 90. Several playwrights were “graduated from” television, although critically derided at the time for their “roots,”
including Paddy Chayevsky, who made his Broadway debut with The Middle
of the Night in 1956, followed by The Tenth Man in 1959. Critics sneered but
were then confounded when scripts that began on television were expanded
for the legitimate stage, and became hits. William Gibson’s The Miracle
Worker, for example, made a star out of Anne Bancroft, who played Helen
Keller’s teacher. (This went on to become a successful film, one of the first
examples of a property to make the rounds in all three mediums.) Gore Vidal’s
A Visit to a Small Planet (1956) was also derided for its television pedigree, but
was one of the few piquant episodes of social comedy during the decade. Vidal
produced another successful play in 1960, The Best Man, but he grew bored
with the theatre and returned to his career as a novelist and essayist.
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Television, however, was just one rival for the attention of the Broadway
theatregoer. In the fifties, Hollywood bought numerous theatres in the Times
Square area and film openings in Times Square became larger events than
their legitimate counterparts. A decade after World War II, a new generation
with different entertainment habits was emerging. Producers and publicists
had to look for new ways of commanding attention and positioning Broadway
as the center of cultural life in New York, let alone America.
This required new ideas and new people to have them. Broadway producers came together in the League of New York Theatres and Producers, originally constituted in 1930. They tried to regulate performance schedules in
order to accommodate customers; Broadway had to become what, in the
nineties, would be called “user-friendly.” An earlier (7:00 PM or 7:30 PM)
Monday curtain was tried in the fifties to little success. But Sunday matinees
were encouraged, box offices were forced to post location charts, fire codes
were enforced, and two-for-one vouchers were promoted.
Ticket purchasing was still a cash-and-carry business, utilizing the box
office or a ticket broker, but this was not without its problems. In the midfifties, a spate of hit shows caused a rash of ticket scalping and box office corruption (known as “ice”) that would plague Broadway for two decades. It took
until 1965 for the State Assembly to legislate standards for ticket sales, but
corrupt practice continued, damaging Broadway’s reputation at a time when
it could ill afford it. A glimmer of hope in resolving these abuses came in 1958,
when four Broadway theatres announced they would take ticket orders
directly over the phone. Eventually, in the seventies, credit cards and computerized clearing agencies would take over ticket sales and move the stock out
of abusive and illegal hands and into the consumers’.
Enter Merrick, Prince – and Papp in the Wings
Three producers who would have tremendous influence on the American
theatre – and who were completely different from one another, except in their
tenacity – began their careers in earnest in the mid-fifties: David Merrick,
Harold Prince, and later Joseph Papp. The logistics of being a Broadway producer had changed considerably. The days of the gentleman producer, whose
word was his bond and who could capitalize a production on his own, were
over. Musicals, and even plays, required a consortium of investors, often
acquired through a prolonged series of “backers’” auditions. Properties were
negotiated with film studios, now frequently up front, and other industries,
such as recording studios (especially after My Fair Lady’s cast album) and
broadcasting networks, underwrote properties for the residual rights. This
was also, thanks to producers like Merrick and Prince, the beginning of the
long-run smash hit. Conversely, because of increasing labor expenses, shows
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2. Caricatures of (left to right) Harold Prince, David Merrick, and Joseph Papp, major
Broadway figures of the 1960s and 1970s. Illustration by Laurence Maslon.
became more expensive with considerable losses possible. Seasons were led
by a few smash hits, followed by a couple of surprise survivors, trailed by an
ever larger number of complete failures.
David Merrick began his career as a lawyer from St. Louis and, after a few
initial efforts in the forties, made his mark on Broadway in 1954 by acquiring
the musical rights to a series of French films by Marcel Pagnol. The resulting
musical, Fanny, would never become a classic, but it was a success, due to
Merrick’s determination and his diabolical talent for publicity. Merrick was a
unique combination of cruelty, single-mindedness, self-promotion, ambition,
and genius. Five seasons after Fanny, he was able to open four productions in
less than a month (two were hits). Most of the productions that interested him
fell into two categories: the blockbuster musical (usually anchored by a star
and a creative staff who had worked with him before, although they usually
swore not to repeat the mistake) and a challenging foreign play (usually
British). For two decades, these made Broadway a very interesting and robust
place to be.
Merrick has been characterized as being neither a creative nor literate producer, often preferring to buy up British plays on shopping trips to England
as if they were antiques, rather than read a new script. But the fact is he
brought major works to America by John Osborne, Jean Anouilh, Tom
Stoppard, as well as Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, directed by Peter Brook. In the
1960–61 season, Merrick had produced six plays, including three musicals,
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two of which were hits. In the same year he founded the David Merrick Arts
Foundation, a kind of not-for-profit subfealty that backed the more serious
efforts until they had time to find their audience. It is his combative personality and his shameless audacity that lingers. He infamously publicized a flop
musical called Subways Are For Sleeping, in 1961, by treating seven citizens to
the show, each of whom had the same name as a leading Broadway critic, and
writing rave reviews for them to endorse. The intended full page ad only ran
in one paper, the Herald-Tribune, but it engendered a tremendous amount of
publicity (see Kissel, David Merrick, 226, 231–34).
Working after the war as an assistant stage manager on Wonderful Town, the
eager and ambitious Harold Prince joined forces with Robert Griffith (and, for
a while, Frederick Brisson) to produce such musicals as The Pajama Game
and Damn Yankees. His early shows were noted for polish and energy, largely
because they were overseen by George Abbott, Prince’s great personal and
artistic mentor. But Prince believed the musical theatre had a journey yet to
go. The adventurousness of Prince and Griffith culminated in Fiorello!, an
unlikely musical biography that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 (Griffith died
the following year), but the show that set Prince on his path was West Side
Story in 1957.
At the time, the up-date of Romeo and Juliet had been turned down by
several writers, abandoned by its initial producer, Cheryl Crawford, and had
a cast of complete unknowns. Although director Jerome Robbins’s choreography was highly praised by many, to some the subject matter was considered
too grim for a musical. It was only with the sale of the property to the movies
that the show’s reputation and fortune was established. But Prince, watching
Robbins work with his collaborators Leonard Bernstein and Stephen
Sondheim, knew that the musical had to challenge its audiences if it were to
continue to grow as an art form. The next decade, as he began directing, he
gave some serious thought to Broadway, and gave it a variety of musicals.
The 1960s: The Age of Precarious
Joseph Papp, who had spent his own herculean battles in the late fifties trying
to get the city to allow him to present free Shakespeare in Central Park, drew
a line in the sand as the sixties began. On 9 May 1960 in an address to the
Women’s City Club of New York (trying to raise money, no less), he insisted
that Broadway, with its emphasis on commercial hits and long runs, was “barbaric,” a “talent-destroyer,” and that “Americans have no concept of supporting the theater as an art form. It’s ‘show business’ to them.” Papp would spend
most of his career trying to battle the barbarity of Broadway, making many
enemies along the way.
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The same page of the New York Times (10 May) that reported on his speech
also listed the winners of the 1960 Drama Desk Awards for “outstanding
achievement in the Off-Broadway theater.” The article included a photograph
of the brooding young writer of The Zoo Story, Edward Albee. In retrospect, it
is an amusing juxtaposition, Papp and Albee, who, from Broadway’s point of
view in the sixties were, respectively, the Pariah and the Messiah.
The decade opened with some mild shocks and disappointments. The economic and critical momentum of the 1956–57 season, with shows like Long
Day’s Journey and My Fair Lady, brought in a record gross box office of $37
million, but this failed to sustain itself. In 1959, for the first time, there were
more shows playing Off-Broadway than on Broadway. Actors’ Equity went on
strike in early June of 1960, shutting down the Broadway theatre for an entire
week. That same year the esteemed Brooks Atkinson retired as drama critic
for the New York Times, to be replaced by Howard Taubman, a music critic,
who was considered an outsider and whose reviews were looked upon with
some skepticism. (Nor did he help much; in the New York Times Index, for his
five-year tenure, the word “deplores” follows the name “Taubman” more than
any other.) The 1960–61 season produced only forty-six shows on Broadway,
an all-time low by a considerable margin. To make matters worse, a 114-day
newspaper strike during 1962–63 forced some shows to close and others to
preview out-of-town until the dispute was settled.
On the faintly bright side, a 5 percent admission tax on tickets was
repealed, with the money going instead to industry pensions and welfare.
There were a few hits along the Street. Jean Kerr’s divorce comedy Mary, Mary
ran for 1,572 performances, while the musicals, Carnival, How to Succeed in
Business Without Really Trying, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum came near to or cracked the 1,000-performance mark. But these were
the avatars of the “show for the tired businessman”: long on professional
savvy, high on comedy (probably the last time in the century one would really
see “musical comedies”), but offering nothing to take the art form further. The
death of Oscar Hammerstein in 1960 ended the triumphant partnership with
Richard Rodgers and the eagerly awaited Lerner and Loewe vehicle Camelot
came into town with the largest advance ever (over $3 million), only to disappoint critics and to end the Lerner and Loewe stage partnership, which had
so invigorated the musical stage of the fifties.
The dramatic stage seemed to owe its success to an influx of British plays,
a trend which was to continue unabated for the next twenty years. Robert
Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons made its American debut in the 1961–62 season
with its star, Paul Scofield, intact and won a record five Tony Awards, while
the next season, a meager offering of forty-three shows (the lowest ever)
revealed that three-quarters of the hit shows were made abroad and brought
to Broadway.
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“There was a time when good plays – plays that were not constructed for
the mass market only but plays that were honest with themselves and also
honest to the historical continuum of the theater . . . could run on Broadway
. . . That’s no longer true.” This is Edward Albee speaking, and one could easily
be forgiven for thinking the quote came from the late eighties, when Albee, in
critical disrepute, might be speaking elegiacally about the days of his 1962
triumph Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. But the quote is from 1963 (see Kolin,
Conversations with Edward Albee, 29). Albee’s standing as a challenger to the
conventions of the Broadway scene had been in place for a long time. He was
already a triumph Off-Broadway and his work carried, for inquisitive New
York audiences, the frisson of the “Absurd,” a category Albee rejects for
himself, but one that drew more than curiosity, a sense that something new
and important was finally being made manifest on the American playwriting
scene again.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee’s first three-act play, was a dissection
of marriage and sexual confidences so thorough and coruscating that it ran
three-and-one-half hours (a second company had to perform it at matinees),
and contained enough frank language and situations to put off several actors
and producers. Eventually, Albee’s loyal producer Richard Barr improbably
teamed up with Billy Rose to open the production, now starring Uta Hagen and
Arthur Hill, on 13 October 1962. Mel Gussow wrote, “Edward Albee is clearly
the most compelling American playwright to explode upon the Broadway
stage since Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller” (quoted in Harris,
Broadway Theatre, 82). The play won the Tony, as did its leading actors, ran
two years, became a ground-breaking film, and was easily the most talked
about play of the decade. At the time, it seemed as if the Messiah had arrived.
But, on Broadway, Messiahs have a way of staying at home. The play did
not win the Pulitzer Prize because of its supposed scabrousness, causing two
of its judges to quit the panel. Indeed, only two Pulitzers for American drama
were awarded during the next six years (ironically, one of them going to Albee
for A Delicate Balance). Albee himself did not write the wished-for stream of
plays that would lead Broadway into understanding the difficult decade
ahead; in the sixties, his plays, mostly worthy, some not, both original and
adaptations, seemed to baffle his audience, who resented having their visas
to the Promised Land canceled. What is most interesting is that the Broadway
triumph of Virginia Woolf is not completely a Broadway triumph at all; its
writer and one of its producers were Off-Broadway talents and the director,
Alan Schneider, and co-stars, George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon, started in
the resident theatre. There would be more dramatic triumphs on Broadway
with similar pedigrees. “Rabbi, wouldn’t this be a good time for the Messiah
to come?” bewails a dispossessed villager in the 1964 hit Fiddler on the Roof.
“We’ll have to wait for him somewhere else,” replies the Rabbi.
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Musicals occupied a precarious and rarified place on Broadway middecade. They were larger and more expensive to produce (about $500,000 by
1965), they took up to six months to recoup costs (twenty years later, it would
take two years), relied on stars and known properties, and only one out of five
musicals were hits (although a better average than the straight play). But, for
someone with a gambler’s instinct, the profits could be enormous. This was
the era of the long run: ten musicals that opened in the sixties passed the
1,000-performance mark, three of them passing the 2,000 mark (Hello, Dolly!,
a Merrick smash, grossed $27 million on Broadway), and one, Fiddler on the
Roof, passing the 3,000 mark, making back $1,574 for every dollar put into it.
Hollywood was also making a new wave of musical adaptations, so that shows
that might not prosper on Broadway might make their investments back on a
film sale.
Record and film companies became primary investors: MCA, Seven Arts
Productions, Capitol, ABC-Paramount were some of the disappointed parties.
RCA Victor gave David Merrick $1.5 million in 1966 for the right to record his
shows (see the New York Times, 19 August 1966, 38). Evidently, the companies
were expecting another My Fair Lady. What they got in the sixties more often
than not was something like Her First Roman, an inept attempt to musicalize
Shaw again, this time his Caesar and Cleopatra. Lightning did not strike twice.
With a score by pop composer Ervin Drake and a well regarded British director, inexperienced with musicals, Her First Roman had disastrous tryouts in
Boston, and the show closed in New York after two weeks, at a $575,000 loss
(see Mandelbaum, Not Since Carrie, 209–11).
Rising above the tide, and guiding his fleet with an eagle eye, was Harold
Prince. He produced Fiddler, directed by the extraordinary Jerome Robbins,
which became the surprise success of the decade. It had two built-in advantages: it was immediately popular with the influential, largely Jewish, theatre
party crowd (who could make or break shows), and it was good theatre. It
overcame its one liability, a star role with a star performance by Zero Mostel.
When he left after a year, the show continued to run on its own merits, much
to the surprise of everyone and, in this, it prefigured the long-running,
celebrity-less musicals of the late eighties.
In 1966, Prince, who turned his personal attention to directing as well, brought
the musical Cabaret to life, displaying some valuable lessons learned from
Robbins’s approach to integrating musical elements within a dramatic structure around a central idea. This became known as the “concept” musical.
Prince was the master of it and, in Cabaret, he brought taste and daring to the
first Broadway musical to deal with as serious a subject as Nazi Germany. It
had much the same effect on the musical as The Diary of Anne Frank had by
confronting similar material a decade earlier; it raised the standard of the art
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form. There were serious musicals before and, of course, perfectly silly ones
after Cabaret, but Prince, to his credit as a producer, never tried to sell the
latter to the public as the former.
Broadway found itself further and further outside the mainstream of
popular music by the time the decade drew to a close, though that gap
seemed to close with Hair, “The American Tribal Love Rock Musical,” which,
after inaugurating Papp’s Public Theater, opened on Broadway in 1968 in a
considerably different production (there was a brief stop at a discotheque in
between). It provided numerous attractions to a Broadway audience inured
to formula: a rock score, a disjointed, revue-like format, a diatribe against
Vietnam, a young unknown cast, and a fleeting – if provocative – glimpse of its
entire cast in the nude. But its charms began to seem as formulaic as what it
was rebelling against. Nevertheless, Hair ran 1,742 performances. As far as its
effect on Broadway’s musical scene is concerned, its influence was more
selective. An “astute Broadway businessman” summed it up for William
Goldman: “Will Hair change things?. . . There will now be a spate of shitty rock
musicals” (The Season, 387). He was right, too. (For an extended analysis of
Hair and other musicals discussed briefly in this chapter, see Chapter 4.)
For most of the turbulent sixties, American life was in the fast lane and
Broadway was puttering along in the service lane. The country was perplexed
and those who went to Broadway for some sort of answers were largely disappointed. David Merrick brought the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Marat/Sade to Broadway in 1966, which had an important impact.
Broadway audiences who might not venture downtown to see what the Living
Theatre was up to, could at least see some of Artaud’s theories played out
under the guidance of Peter Brook. It was also further evidence of what
Goldman coined “the Snob Hit” – a British import that “had” to be seen,
whether or not the public understood it. If something like Marat/Sade could
become a hit, why not equally difficult British material? As American playwriting went into limbo in the seventies, more and more “Snob Hits” sublet
Broadway.
The country’s racial issues were largely neglected on Broadway. Actors’
Equity sponsored an “integration showcase” in 1959 to experiment with what
would come to be called “non-traditional casting.” As a union, it took increasing interest in providing opportunities for black actors, under its African
American President from 1964 to 1970, Frederick O’Neal. But American writing
about or by blacks slowed to a crawl after the invigorating promise of Lorraine
Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. Perhaps there were no writers who
could contain and theatricalize the rage in black America and make it palatable to Broadway audiences. This changed in 1967 when Howard Sackler, a
white author, wrote The Great White Hope, which debuted at Arena Stage.
Focusing on Jack Johnson, a black boxer at the beginning of the century, and
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his relations with his white mistress, Sackler created a slightly fictionalized
American epic – raw, unwieldy, potent, and persuasive. The play’s critical
success in Washington inspired producer Herman Levin to bring the production to Broadway, with most of its original cast and director. After its
Broadway opening it made stars out of its leads, James Earl Jones and Jane
Alexander, and went on to win the Pulitzer, the Tony, and the New York Drama
Critics’ Circle Awards.
But its considerable and deserved success could not conceal the fact that
The Great White Hope was pretty much from top to bottom an import.
Broadway had slowly accepted the fact of West End transfers to New York, but
now plays and artists were coming to Broadway from all sorts of other places.
Walter Kerr, writing for the Sunday New York Times on 22 September 1968,
admitted as much: “Broadway itself is now a Port Authority Terminal, and the
buses from Everywhere leave you standing in the middle of Everywhere
without moving a muscle.” Off-Broadway flourished during the late sixties,
especially when it came to tackling – however haphazardly – the subjects that
concerned urban Americans: Vietnam, homosexuality, race relations, drugs.
“Happenings” were staged in art galleries and other venues, theatre events
were staged in parks and on the street all over New York, and anyone who considered him or herself a member of the cultivated intelligentsia was certainly
seeking out some of these attractions. Harold Prince, when asked if
“Broadway has had it” by the New York Times in 1969, responded defensively,
“it depends on your definition of Broadway. More rightly, your question
should be, ‘Has theater in Manhattan had it?’, in which case, the obvious
answer is no” (23 April).
Those who wrote about Broadway had come to realize, albeit begrudgingly,
that Off-Broadway and regional theatres were there to stay, and they spoke of
the shift in the way people talk about their neighborhoods: Kerr wrote in the
New York Times, “In no time at all, and so imperceptibly we still haven’t
noticed it, almost everything has changed” (23 April 1969). Broadway also had
difficulty entertaining the notion that repertory theatre could exist in its own
neighborhood. In 1962, plans for the Repertory Theater of the new Lincoln
Center were begun, and they materialized in 1964, when Elia Kazan (the director of the new company, along with producer Robert Whitehead) staged
Arthur Miller’s new play After The Fall in the company’s temporary home in
Washington Square. Two years later, after a handful of productions in repertory, when the Vivian Beaumont Theater was ready to house the company,
Kazan and Whitehead had been inelegantly replaced by Herbert Blau and
Jules Irving from San Francisco’s Actors’ Workshop. This regime (Blau left
after two years) specialized in European classics in straight runs.
Perhaps Broadway felt comfortable with something less ambitious. In 1964,
the Association for Producing Artists, headed by Ellis Rabb, joined the Off-
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Broadway Phoenix Theatre and, a year later, presented their repertory
seasons at the Lyceum, on Broadway. This was a company that knew how to
work together. Headed by Rabb, Rosemary Harris, Donald Moffat – even Helen
Hayes joined them for a season – they made their mark with “American classics” – plays from between the wars, like You Can’t Take It With You, which
sparked that interest in resuscitating American classics with star actors that
continues on Broadway to this day. Despite critical acclaim, the APA-Phoenix
racked up a $900,000 deficit by 1969, and Rabb departed a year later, but in its
time they had quietly achieved the kind of resident theatre company that was
flourishing outside of New York.
As the decade ended and the next began, Broadway also had to worry
about its own real estate. There are moments when Broadway is rudely awakened to the fact that it sits at the center of the most fractious city in the
country, on the most expensive real estate in the free world. This was one of
those times. Urban decay had been setting in, strikes – newspaper, transit,
taxis, garbage – were rampant, and all of them had hurt business. Mayor John
V. Lindsay, who was a theatre enthusiast, attempted a number of civic interventions to make Broadway more relevant to the city, but met with little
success.
The 1970s: Naughty, Bawdy, Gaudy, and Sporty
As the seventies began, Broadway was in a state of acute paralysis. The progressive frankness and experimentation of the late sixties had happened very
quickly and very intensely and had spread to other art forms. This was most
apparent in the movies, which had evolved into a new maturity that appealed
to throngs of new audience members. Meanwhile, theatre audiences had to
contend with issues on the stage that, even five years earlier, would have been
unthinkable. On top of that, New Yorkers could sample every kind of “new
theatre”: Off-Broadway plays of every style and manner, Sam Shepard at the
Vivian Beaumont, the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and even Grotowski
paid a visit to New York.
What was Broadway to do? Was this the wave of the future? Would all shows
have to include nudity, four-letter words, and audience participation? “The
audience has got to have more rehearsal time,” wrote Walter Kerr. “It is being
asked to do so many things these days” (quoted in Guernsey, Curtain Times,
184). It was as if the Broadway world was some vast supercollider, with the
highly charged particles of the late sixties smashing into the wall of decades
of Broadway tradition. No explosion occurred, however; instead there was a
kind of implosion where everything settled down into a hiding place, waiting
for the all-clear sign, or at least an idea or two that would revitalize the Street.
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The early seventies was Broadway’s direst period. In the 1970–71 season,
there were fifty-six shows, only eight of which were straight plays originating
on Broadway. Production and labor costs were growing, necessitating a
fifteen-dollar ticket price for weekend musicals, and the rise in costs and
ticket prices outpaced inflation. When Follies, the Harold Prince–Stephen
Sondheim musical, closed in 1972, it had lost, according to Prince, $665,000
(Contradictions, 231). This would have been depressing under any circumstance, but the show had run 522 performances – a year and a half. When, a
year later, Seesaw, an infinitely less inspired musical, closed after ten months,
its loss was $1.25 million. Shows with reviews that would have put them over
the top five years earlier had a tough time of it, plus, by 1972, there were only
three newspapers left to supply the reviews. The increase in television theatre
critics failed to fill the gap.
There had been other grim times on Broadway, but now there was something new. The city, more specifically the Theatre District in the mid-West
Forties, was no longer perceived as safe, let alone glamorous. Prostitution,
drugs, pornography, muggings, an extreme night life overran the area. It had
a devastating effect on business and, worse, on morale. There was an insidious effect: the fewer the shows, the emptier the Street; the emptier the
Street, the fewer the shows. People did not want to come to midtown
Manhattan at night and the manifold media portrayals of the decay kept customers away.
Most of the producers’ efforts during this time, led by the League, were
spent attempting to stem the catastrophic tide. A change in New York City
zoning laws provided Broadway with a mixed blessing. A large tax break was
given to developers who put theatres in the ground floors of their new buildings. Several new office buildings grew in the Theatre District in the early
seventies, housing the Minskoff, the Uris (later renamed the Gershwin) and
the revitalized Circle in the Square. Brooks Atkinson called them “theater facilities” rather than theatres, “houses but not homes” (Broadway, 471) and the
Uris opened with Via Galactica, one of the worst bombs in Broadway history,
a “shitty rock musical” from the creators of Hair.
Among other attempts at Broadway’s amelioration were the League’s
second trial of a 7:30 curtain for the convenience of commuting theatregoers;
attempts at a “Middle Theatre” or “Limited Gross” contract for smaller dramatic plays (these never happened); increases in credit card services and
other ticket-buying conveniences, such as Ticketron (a computerized ticket
service available at department stores); free parking (a short-lived Merrick
idea); student rush deals; even a suggestion that unused theatres be turned
into gambling casinos. Kerr, in his 3 June 1973 article, fantasized that all of
Broadway could move to the Upper East Side to be near residents, just the
way movie theatres recently had.
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Mayor Lindsay, despite his problems with New York City unions, threw his
support into cleaning up Times Square. The most enduring and important
change to the Theatre District was the creation of the Theatre Development
Fund in 1968. Initially, the Fund used donated money to purchase blocks of
tickets to worthy shows and sell them to consumers at reduced rates. By 1972
the Fund suggested the possibility of selling unused tickets to customers on
the day of performance at a cut rate. Initially, there was resistance from producers who feared that this would promote the idea that their shows were not
hits (well, they weren’t), but in the spring of 1973, with the help of the New
York City Cultural Council and the Office of Midtown Planning and
Development, the Fund opened the Times Square Theatre Center, an open-air
booth in Duffy Square. The center, known more affectionately as “the TKTS
booth” (for its logo), sold tickets for half-price, plus a small surcharge, and
was an instant success. By the end of the nineties, the TKTS sales constituted
roughly 11 percent of all sales on and Off-Broadway combined.3 More importantly, the sight of crowds swarming Broadway and Forty-seventh Street,
anxious for tickets, helped Broadway’s image immeasurably.
The actual work on stage in the early seventies seemed tentative, with a few
notable exceptions. Probably the most exciting and theatrical work on
Broadway was done in 1970 by Prince and Sondheim, working for the first time
as producer-director and composer-lyricist on Company, an original musical
about marriage and relationships set in contemporary Manhattan. It was a
relief to have a musical which was not set in Victorian England, medieval
Spain, or the 1930s (or Ancient Egypt, for that matter), and it was an undeniably adult experience. Prince (working as co-director with choreographer
Michael Bennett) and Sondheim worked on Follies one season later, another
contemporary original musical, this time about a bittersweet reunion of
Follies girls. The mordant tone confused audiences who wanted to see the
World War II-era cast perform their treasured routines, but the show was one
of the most ambitious musicals ever, and, although it garnered much praise
and respect for its creators, it was a financial failure. In 1973–74, Prince and
Sondheim teamed up again for A Little Night Music, a Chekhovian musical of
an Ingmar Bergman film. This time, its adult tone resonated with critics and
audiences and it went on to become the team’s biggest hit and even – mirabile dictu – produced a popular song hit in “Send in the Clowns.”
In the early seventies, nostalgia also became a major selling item, perhaps
as a reaction to the forceful contemporaneity of the late sixties. A revival of
the twenties musical No, No, Nanette, retrofitted with stars from the thirties,
became a huge hit, and gave way to similar revivals that had healthy lives on
Broadway and especially on the Road. Revivals found a more than hospitable
home on Broadway, a trend that shows little sign of abating in the nineties. In
the 1973–74 season, nineteen out of the fifty-four shows on Broadway were
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revivals. True, some of them were safe repackagings of shows with stars but,
in that season, Jason Robards, Jr. and Colleen Dewhurst appeared in a production of O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, which was not only the major
event of the season, but a reclamation of an important play. Along with
Prince’s radical rethink of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide (which opened at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music and moved to Broadway in the 1974–75 season),
the O’Neill conferred a new respect on the revival and its potential to infuse
Broadway with excitement and box office receipts.
When serious drama appeared, it was almost all from the West End: Sleuth,
Home, Vivat! Vivat Regina!, Butley, and The Changing Room were successful
transfers that most often were headed by their British stars. To the rescue
came, as if waiting for his cue, Joseph Papp. Papp’s relentless activity developing new plays at the Public Theater brought glory to Broadway when he
transferred Sticks and Bones by David Rabe and, more persuasively, That
Championship Season by Jason Miller. Miller’s play, about a fraught reunion of
high-school basketball players, won the 1973 Tony, the Pultizer, and the New
York Critics’ Circle Award and ran for an impressive 700 performances. These
triumphs, plus Papp’s acquisition of the Astor Library from New York City (it
became the several-theatre Public) in a sweetheart deal, the transfer of the
musical Two Gentlemen of Verona to Broadway, and even his aborted arrangement with CBS to broadcast several of his plays, made Papp the one man to
inject some energy into the dismal Broadway of the mid-seventies.
He chose to do, as he often did, the impossible: he took over Lincoln Center
Theater in 1973. He brought his Public Theater board with him, increased his
margin for financial error, and continued to run the Public. For two seasons
he produced new plays at the Beaumont and when these were met with insufficient enthusiasm, switched to first-class revivals with major artists (Andrei
Serban’s The Cherry Orchard with Irene Worth and Richard Foreman’s The
Threepenny Opera with Raul Julia were unforgettable events). Meanwhile, he
initiated a series of five new plays at Broadway’s Booth Theatre, the first
formal extended relationship between an Off-Broadway theatre and a
Broadway venue, but only one play, The Leaf People, opened there (it closed
quickly). By 1977, Papp, citing insufficient commitment on the part of his
funders (even with the revivals, the Vivian Beaumont was an expensive proposition) and insufficient curiosity on the part of audiences, had pulled out of
Lincoln Center completely.
But Papp still ran the Public and it was there, in 1975, amongst the hum of
activity, that a workshop he sponsored would change Broadway. Papp had
known choreographer and director Michael Bennett slightly and was interested in his directing a musical revival for him. But Bennett preferred to
work on an informal project involving the personal stories of chorus dancers
that had evolved from taped sessions he had been working on with some
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colleagues. Papp gave Bennett the space and wrote the checks, and Bennett
hired dancers and an artistic team.
Papp’s support may have gotten the project started, but it was the skill of
Bennett and the raw power and vulnerability of his cast pouring out their lives
through the characters of a score of dancers auditioning for a Broadway
chorus that ignited the Newman Theater in April of 1975. Word spread
throughout New York and by the fall, A Chorus Line opened at the Shubert
Theatre. It received the best – and most perceptive – reviews of the decade
and won every theatre award available. It became the longest-running show
on Broadway. It made Bennett’s reputation, as well as burnishing the legend
of the director-choreographer; it established the workshop as the preferable
method of working out costly and complicated Broadway musicals (as
opposed to out-of-town tryouts); and it created a modern, dramatic musical
that could also, not coincidentally, because of its scale and lack of a star, make
millions on the Road. (It also gently paved the way for more intelligent and
sympathetic portrayals of gay themes on Broadway, thanks to the revelatory
monologue of one of its characters.)
But most of that came later. The immediate effect of A Chorus Line was more
potent: “[It] came at a time when everybody was predicting the Broadway
theatre was dead and would never come back again. Along came A Chorus Line
and everyone changed their opinion about Broadway. There was a new wave
of enthusiasm and hope,” recalled producer Bernard B. Jacobs (Mandelbaum,
A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett, 289). The show certainly
gave Jacobs enthusiasm and hope. As the co-Chief Executive Officer of the
Shubert Organization with Gerald Schoenfeld, Jacobs profited from the
show’s long tenancy at the Shubert Theatre. Although Jacobs and Schoenfeld
were not descended from the famous Shubert family (former legal employees
of the family, they took over the organization in 1972), they became known as
the Shuberts and took an increasingly active role in Broadway production in
the late seventies. They owned sixteen theatres and a half-share in one more,
and began to put money into productions, often bringing shows in from
regional theatres, London’s West End, or Off-Broadway.
Jacobs was right, up to a point. A hit on Broadway can change things
around quickly, but Broadway was on an upswing before A Chorus Line
opened downtown. The British psychological drama Equus created a huge stir
in the 1974–75 season, as did Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year, which was
really nothing more than a genteel sex comedy from the sixties, but somehow
seemed welcome again, especially with the expert acting of Ellen Burstyn and
Charles Grodin. An all-black version of The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, became a
tremendous hit. Although not the finest hour for black artists, it did have a
black producer and artistic staff, and most importantly, brought black audiences to Broadway (as well as families of all kinds, for the first time in about
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a decade). The Wiz built on the achievements of Melvin Van Peebles’s Ain’t
Supposed to Die a Natural Death and Vinnette Carroll’s Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t
Cope, original musicals about the urban African American experience produced in the early seventies, and brought in a new audience, “an audience that
the white establishment has for years been saying did not exist” (see “Blacks
Gain on Broadway,” New York Times, 6 June 1975).
Nonetheless, by the time A Chorus Line transferred, Broadway was seeing
another audience that did not seem to exist: a paying one, and it came in
droves. The 1975–76 season’s grosses totaled $70.8 million, 20 percent more
than the previous record held by the 1967–68 season, especially remarkable,
considering an almost month-long musicians’ strike in October that closed all
the musicals. It was a particularly exciting season musically, with A Chorus
Line; Prince and Sondheim’s most ambitious effort, an all-Asian, mostly male
excursion into the perils of empire in Pacific Overtures; and Bob Fosse’s
endearingly malicious look at vaudeville and murder, Chicago. Fosse, almost
parenthetically, made one of the most important contributions of the decade
when he directed the TV commercial for his 1972 musical Pippin. The commercial, the first prominent one for a Broadway show, surely did much to
extend the four-year life of a mediocre musical and became a model for others.
Although there was not much original drama on stage that season, there
were powerful actors, many in the season’s twenty-eight revivals (out of sixtyfive productions): Shirley MacLaine, Gwen Verdon, Yul Brynner, Katharine
Hepburn, George C. Scott, Alfred Drake, Eva Le Gallienne, Vanessa Redgrave,
Ruth Gordon, Colleen Dewhurst, and three young actors solidifying their star
quality: Sam Waterston, Raul Julia, and Meryl Streep. But no star caught the
spotlight quite the way Richard Burton did when he took over the lead in
Equus, making his first Broadway appearance in twelve years. His fourteenweek engagement sold out and led to his appearance in the film version. More
importantly, Burton confounded the unspoken assumption that replacing an
original actor was a come-down. From that moment until today, many actors
of the first order, such as Liza Minnelli, David Bowie, Mary Tyler Moore, and
Whoopi Goldberg, rehabilitated shows and their careers by taking over the
leads from lesser known actors in established Broadway shows.
The next season brought in a staggering $93.4 million of total Broadway
grosses, proving this comeback was no fluke. A good deal of this success was
borne on the backs of musical revivals with their original stars, like Fiddler on
the Roof and The King and I, concert performances by familiar performers like
Diana Ross and Debbie Reynolds, and by Annie, an unabashedly sentimental
musical of the old school, which brought families back to the theatre and,
along with A Chorus Line, produced the first viable touring shows in years. The
Road became an increasing source of theatrical income, thanks to these
shows and Evita.
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Broadway was back as a presence in the New York economy; the Times calculated that the upturn in box office produced three times as much additional
income for local industry. Ticket prices grew higher; The Act, starring Liza
Minnelli, went to twenty-five dollars for a top ticket, despite criticism that
Minnelli was lip-synching some of her numbers. Broadway had become
better able to manage itself as an industry and, largely through its lobbying
efforts, the Theatre District was slowly getting cleaned up. A successful ad
campaign, sponsored by the New York State Tourism Board, called “ I ♥ NY”
showed clips of many Broadway musicals, as did the annual, highly polished
television broadcasts of the Tony Awards, and these drew the tourist trade
in droves.
The Shubert Organization took an increasingly large hand in the industry,
establishing a national computerized telephone ticket service for their shows,
Tele-charge, and putting more and more money into proven properties from
Off-Broadway, the regional theatres, and the West End. This led to an increasing rivalry over theatre bookings with the Nederlander Organization, which
made its mark in New York by restoring the Palace in 1965, and owned eight
Broadway theatres by the end of the decade. More to the point, these organizations (along with the Jujamacyn Theatres, owners of five Broadway theatres) filled a void by default. There were few producers of the Prince–Merrick
school any more (they were both around, but doing less), but, for all the
money that the Shuberts and Nederlanders put into Broadway shows, they
were real estate people, not artists (though both sponsor philanthropic
organizations that fund not-for-profit theatre).
By the late seventies, Broadway had settled into a pattern that would hold,
despite a few exceptions, for the next twenty years. There would be an ever
decreasing number of productions. In the 1952–53 season, there were fiftyfour, which at the time was seen as calamitous. From 1977 on, Broadway rose
to that number only once, with the number of productions usually in the midforties, or even as low as thirty-six in the 1983–84 season. Conversely, the total
box office grosses rose every season from 1975–76 to 1982–83, breaking the
$100 million mark in 1978 and breaking the $200 million mark only four
seasons later. During the same period, the top ticket price in 1975 was $17.50;
the top in 1983 was $45.00. More insidious than the price inflation was the
barely mentioned sense that even though business was better, the material on
stage was not.
The 1980s: Send in the Clones
In a way, more disheartening than the dwindling number of productions and
their high prices by 1980, was the utter predictability of the Broadway menu,
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season after season, for almost the next two decades. Serious drama would
be largely brought in from the regional theatre (The Shadow Box, Children of
a Lesser God, Crimes of the Heart), Off-Broadway (Talley’s Folly, The Elephant
Man), and the West End (Whose Life Is It Anyway? and Amadeus). The late
seventies and early eighties brought a surprising run of plays about sickness
and disability: The Shadow Box, The Elephant Man, Whose Life, Wings, Bosoms
and Neglect, Children of a Lesser God, and, one might add, Richard III (starring
Al Pacino). There were interesting plays – The Fifth of July by Lanford Wilson
(Off-Broadway transfer), The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard (West End), David
Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (London and regional) – but nothing to start a
movement, or invade the solipsistic cocktail party chatter of the eighties.
“These days, the theater is a special interest, occupying a ghetto on the cultural landscape,” wrote critic Frank Rich in the New York Times (19 February
1984). “Much of what is most loudly acclaimed as serious drama in New York
– and then disseminated nationwide through regional and touring productions – isn’t really serious at all.”
Neil Simon, being cleverer than most playwrights, worked out his strategy
for plays in advance. His planned trilogy of memory plays about his youth and
growth as a writer was produced throughout the eighties. The first, Brighton
Beach Memoirs, ran 1,530 performances, after opening in 1983; the second,
Biloxi Blues (1985), won Simon his first Tony, and, along with the last,
Broadway Bound (1986), ran over 500 performances. Although no longer quite
the comic and economic powerhouse he was in the sixties, Simon, out of a
combination of longevity and increased introspection, began to receive the
respect of his colleagues and his critics.
Book musicals, on the wane, would be supplemented by a spate of revues:
some inspired, like 1977’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, a rediscovery of Fats Waller, and
some elegant, like the West End’s Side by Side by Sondheim. Most of them,
however, were of the “And Then I Wrote. . .” school, but, when a book musical
like Shenandoah could run over 1,000 performances and still lose 80 percent
of its investment, a revue looked like a good and economical vehicle. What
book musicals remained (often about six per season) usually split their audience in two: the occasional ambitious show like Sweeney Todd, the Demon
Barber of Fleet Street playing opposite a crowd-pleaser like They’re Playing Our
Song in the 1977–78 season. The dichotomy between Evita and Sugar Babies
fulfilled a similar function the following season, and the 1983–84 season
became silly season when Jerry Herman, trumpeting his hit show La Cage aux
Folles as it swept the 1984 Tonys, said that the “simple, hummable show” was
finally having a comeback – a clear swipe at Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park
with George, a demanding, if esoteric, musical that had to content itself with
a Pulitzer Prize and a rave review (some said a crusade) from the New York
Times. The idea of a spat, let alone a duel, would have been welcome the next
season, when there were so few musicals that categories of best actor, best
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actress, and choreography had to be removed from the Tony Awards. The
winner by default was Big River, a version of Huckleberry Finn that did little
credit either to its source or Broadway.
Revivals were a permanent powerhouse part of every season, especially
musical revivals, which became so prominent in the late 1980s that they
received their own Tony Award category. Stars were safe bets to hold down
the economic end of things. The eighties opened with the astonishing
Broadway debut of Elizabeth Taylor in The Little Foxes; she was equal to the
part and more than equal, not surprisingly, to the concomitant demands of
the enormous publicity that attended her appearance. Actors like Anthony
Quinn, Glenda Jackson, Jessica Tandy, Jason Robards, Rex Harrison, and
Dustin Hoffman all had commercial revivals built around them (Lena Horne
staging a hugely successful comeback concert on Broadway), and the trend
only increased into the nineties.
That said, the early eighties had its share of thrills and surprises. No one
would think of springing a surprise on Broadway in the dog days of August,
except probably David Merrick. After a hiatus of five years, he brought a new
musical to Broadway, 42nd Street, a stage version of the Warner Brothers film.
The production was overseen by Gower Champion, the director-choreographer who had delivered Merrick such success in the past. When the opening
came on 25 August 1980 at the Winter Garden Theatre, Merrick interrupted
the thunderous curtain call applause to announce to a stunned house that
Champion had died that afternoon (of complications from a rare blood
disease). Some thought he was joking; he was not, and however tactless his
tactic was, it brought huge amounts of publicity. The musical ran for 3,486 performances, the longest run for an American show in the eighties, at one point
bringing Merrick half a million dollars a week net profit. It was to be his last
big success, as he suffered a stroke in 1983.
Merrick had twice brought the Royal Shakespeare Company to Broadway,
but no one could have been prepared for their reappearance in the 1981–82
season (under the aegis of another management) in the two-part eight-and-ahalf-hour adaptation of Dickens’s The Life & Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
The show did not sell well in advance – the unprecedented $100 ticket to both
parts had a great deal to do with it, no doubt – and the reviews were not uniformly strong, but word-of-mouth and a cover story for Time magazine soon
made “Nick Nick” a financial success – and a Snob Hit for people who hated
Snob Hits. The superb staging by Trevor Nunn and John Caird brought ensemble work not seen since Marat/Sade to Broadway audiences (other companies
would attempt this with less success in the decade to come) and Nunn himself
would go on to stage some of the biggest musical successes on Broadway.
If, in the early seventies, “massage parlor” was the most frequently heard
two-word phrase around the Theatre District, by the early eighties, the phrase
had become “John Portman.” In 1974, Portman had the unfortunate lot of
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being the developer for a huge hotel complex on Broadway between Fortyfifth and Forty-sixth streets. His – and Broadway’s – troubles began when the
building of the hotel necessitated the demolition of the Morosco, Helen Hayes,
and Bijou Theatres. Emotions ran extremely high on the subject; the new theatres, which were to replace them, like the Uris, were not popular, and it certainly did not help that one of the endangered theatres – quite a charming one
– was named after the First Lady of the American theatre. The next decade
was a series of court injunctions and battles, newspaper editorials and demonstrations, but the finale came on 22 March 1982 when, after the United
States Supreme Court lifted a temporary stay, the jaws of a backhoe bit into
the remaining wall of the Bijou. The hotel, once called the Portman, became
the Marriott Marquis and a huge musical theatre was built in its lobby. There
was much debate in the ensuing years about whether, in order to avoid a
similar battle over expensive midtown real estate, Broadway theatres should
be designated landmarks by the New York City Landmarks and Parks
Commission, but this, too, caused a rift along Broadway. Some, mostly producers, thought this would inhibit interior changes in the theatre to accommodate productions, and there was also an issue over selling potentially
lucrative air rights above the theatres.
Producing became a complicated affair by the mid-eighties. The high costs
of production (the musical My One and Only cost $4 million in 1983) required
a large number of investors to raise the capital for a show and sustain it
through rocky times. There was a rash of film corporations entering into production agreements, backing both plays and musicals in order to develop the
material and retain the motion picture and residual rights. The advent of cable
television in Manhattan brought a number of agreements where cable companies would get the rights to broadcast Broadway shows directly into people’s
apartments. This helped the prestige of the new cable companies, but not
their business; it was a financial disaster, as were most of the film companies’
investments. By the 1990s, both media had pulled out of Broadway investment, with the important exception of the Walt Disney Co., and to a lesser
degree, independent film producers like David Geffen and Scott Rudin. It fell
to a myriad of amateur producers to make up the difference: in the 1993–94
season, ninety individuals were billed over the title as producers for a mere
thirty-four productions.
The 1990s: The British Are Humming
If the spread between feast and famine was large in the mid-eighties, it would
grow to dangerous proportions from then on. In the dismal days of Broadway
in the seventies, when the British play overran American efforts, there was at
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3. Caricatures of (left to right) the Shuberts (Gerald Schoenfeld and the late Bernard
B. Jacobs), Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Cameron Mackintosh, prominent Broadway
figures of the 1980s and 1990s. Illustration by Laurence Maslon.
least the comfort that the American musical was commercial and artistically
dominant. All that changed when, in 1982, with distinctly non-cat-like tread,
the British musical Cats opened at the Winter Garden. Already a surprise sensation in London, it arrived on Broadway with a $6.2 million advance sale. The
creative team behind it would go on to wield tremendous power on Broadway.
Composer and producer Andrew Lloyd Webber already had two Broadway
hits to his credit, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. The director was Trevor
Nunn, who would go on to direct several more Webber musicals. The main
producer was Cameron Mackintosh, a comparatively young Englishman, who
would build a huge empire exporting contemporary British musicals (“pop
operas” they would be called, or, simply, “megahits”).
Cats was followed by a series of British megahits that involved at least one
of these individuals: Les Misérables (Mackintosh and Nunn, 1987), Starlight
Express (Lloyd Webber, 1987), The Phantom of the Opera (Lloyd Webber,
Mackintosh, directed by Harold Prince, 1988), Miss Saigon (Mackintosh, 1991),
and Sunset Boulevard (Lloyd Webber, Nunn, 1995). They had numerous qualities in common: they were largely through-composed in a pop idiom; they
relied on spectacle rather than character or story (not quite fair to say in the
case of Les Miz, as it was called); they did not require a major star for box office
value, nor, in some cases, even a knowledge of the English language. This last
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was the most crucial part of Mackintosh’s genius; the logos for the shows were
simple and bold, advertising the experience of the show and therefore continuing to sell it, no matter how many cast changes it might go through.
They also made a great deal of money (or spent it; Starlight Express cost $8.8
million and Sunset Boulevard $13 million – neither made back its entire investment in New York). As these were essentially produced by the same team
(although Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber went their separate ways after
Phantom), their successes fed on each other, in terms of advertising and perception. They injected vitality into the Broadway box office, and, more impressively, they recreated the economics of the Road; in 1995–96, the gross on the
Road was $762 million – nearly double Broadway grosses for that season –
largely the result of touring companies of these shows. How much money they
brought to Broadway is certainly calculable: Cats, as of the night it became the
longest running show in Broadway history, 19 June 1997, had grossed $329
million on Broadway (and $2.2 billion worldwide!). Put more boldly, Cats,
Phantom, Les Misérables, and Miss Saigon, as of June 1998, had run a combined
total of forty-five years on Broadway.
There were problems, of course. As the importers of great potential wealth
(Miss Saigon had a $36 million advance), Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh called
the shots, even if their interests and Broadway’s were at odds. Casting became
an issue. Lloyd Webber wanted to bring his wife, Sarah Brightman, over as the
female lead in Phantom, despite Equity’s objection. Mackintosh wanted to
bring over the British female lead of Miss Saigon, as well as Jonathan Pryce,
its star, to play a Eurasian character, despite Equity’s objection on both
counts (it insisted on an Asian American actor). Lloyd Webber wanted to
bring Glenn Close to Broadway as the lead in Sunset Boulevard, breaking his
contract with Patti LuPone, who originated the role in London. Lloyd Webber
and Mackintosh got what they wanted in all three cases, with only minor compromises. The shows became objects of derision from American producers
and artists and there was a xenophobic fear, not entirely unfounded, that
these shows were taking over Broadway.
The American musical theatre offered little resistance or competition.
Stephen Sondheim and Prince had not worked as a team since 1981; Prince
had a long slump before Phantom, and Sondheim began working with director-librettist James Lapine on a series of rather inert musicals. More tragically,
both Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse died in 1987: Bennett of AIDS, Fosse of a
heart attack. Their absence, regrettable at any time, came exactly when
Broadway needed their inventiveness and drive. Into the breach high-stepped
Tommy Tune, a tall, lanky dancer who had worked with Bennett, and who lent
his jolly razzmatazz as director-choreographer to uninspired material like
Grand Hotel and The Will Rogers Follies.
Oddly enough, on the American playwriting scene, at the same time, there
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began to be heard some unique and invigorating voices, almost exclusively
nurtured by regional or not-for-profit organizations. August Wilson made his
Broadway debut in 1984 with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the first in a cycle of
plays about the African American experience (six to date), most of which were
developed with director Lloyd Richards at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Wendy
Wasserstein’s work was similarly sponsored and supported, first by
Playwrights Horizons and then Lincoln Center Theater, before it moved to
Broadway. The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and The Sisters Rosensweig (1993) were
witty and insightful portraits of a new generation of professional women.
Writers like Wilson and Wasserstein were finding success in investigating the
contemporary zeitgeist and they were matched in their efforts by John
Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation (1990), which captured the social confusion
of the 1980s through its use of the true story of a black con man who ensnared
an Upper East Side family. After moving to Broadway from Lincoln Center it
became that rara avis – the talked-about American play.
Lincoln Center Theater had a huge comeback during this period, beginning
in 1985, after an interregnum of four years when the Vivian Beaumont was
dark or rented out. Under the leadership of Gregory Mosher and Bernard
Gerstein, Lincoln Center offered memberships, instead of subscriptions, and
soon attracted a large base of customers who enjoyed a wide variety of fare,
from revivals of musicals and American classics (Anything Goes, The Front
Page), to South African imports (Sarafina! ), to new work by authors like
Wasserstein and Guare. Although Mosher was succeeded by André Bishop, it
was clear that Lincoln Center Theater had finally made a successful transition.
Transition was not immediately as smooth at the Public Theater. Joseph
Papp, in ailing health, had passed the reins to JoAnne Akalaitis in 1991, before
his own death that year. Akalaitis lasted a year and the Public was taken over
by George C. Wolfe, who had contributed his own brand of slightly surreal
slick energy to Jelly’s Last Jam, a 1992 Broadway musical that brought social
commentary into a seemingly standard revue of Jelly Roll Morton’s life. Wolfe
was promptly given the directing assignment of the nineties: staging Tony
Kushner’s ambitious two-part epic about AIDS and contemporary American
life, Angels in America. The plays had been done in workshops and various
productions around the country, including the Mark Taper Forum. For its
Broadway debut, Angels in America was taken over by Wolfe, who opened the
first part, Millennium Approaches, in 1992, and the second part Perestroika, in
1993. Rehearsals for the second part required canceling performances of the
first, which had gone on to win a Tony Award and a Pulitzer, and when the
opening of Part II was delayed, it raised the second play’s capitalization to $3
million.
Both parts were equally acclaimed in the press, and they certainly were the
kinds of plays Broadway hadn’t seen in decades: topical, at times shocking,
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imaginative, theatrical, controversial. But, both plays together ran less than
600 performances, closing in 1994; what had started so promisingly intellectually and theatrically, was a financial disappointment, only recouping its
investment two and one-half years after it closed, thanks to subsequent productions. If the most acclaimed play(s) of the decade couldn’t make a go of it,
what play could?
Another attempt to ameliorate the situation was the creation of the
Broadway Alliance in 1990, an agreement to scale back fees, expenses, and
ticket costs, in order to pass the savings on to the consumer. After a series of
failures, the Alliance had its first success in 1994 with Terrence McNally’s
Love! Valour! Compassion! and the next year with his Master Class (although
both plays were transfers from successful engagements). As of June 1997, the
League, along with the unions, theatre owners, and business leaders, was
examining another program called the “Broadway Initiative” to subsidize and
promote serious drama on Broadway, as well as attract a vastly dwindling
younger audience. Evidentally, drama of any kind on Broadway was in trouble
when even Neil Simon moved Off-Broadway for his 1994 comedy London Suite.
Still, stars remained capable of drawing audiences on Broadway. In the
1994–95 season, box office names like Kathleen Turner, Matthew Broderick,
Glenn Close, and Patrick Stewart helped crack the $400 million mark in total
grosses for the first time. Yet no star in recent memory galvanized Broadway
in the way Julie Andrews did when she returned in 1995, after a thirty-fouryear absence, to carry, Atlas-like (or Sisyphus-like), the musical vehicle
Victor/Victoria. Unfortunately, her vehicle failed her; when it did not get nominated for a Tony, she withdrew her own nomination, sparking one of the
loudest Tony controversies in history. The low-rated 1996 Award ceremony
was a particularly sorry affair, as CBS cut back the telecast to two hours and
cut off speeches by some of the theatre’s giants. This was another sign of
Broadway’s cultural diminution, as the League seemingly submitted to any
humiliation in order to put Broadway on prime time. In 1997, the Tonys
regained their glory by giving the extra hour to public broadcasting and
having the show hosted by TV personality Rosie O’Donnell, an outspoken supporter of musical comedy on her talk show (her power to help create hit musicals, such as the tepidly received Titanic in 1997, gave her clout unmatched
since the heyday of Ed Sullivan). Her popularity among television audiences
boosted the Tony ratings both in 1997 and 1998.
By the end of the 1997–98 season, a sense of change, rejuvenation, and
paradox was easily apparent on the Broadway scene. Two musicals from the
1996–97 season, Rent and Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk, were playing to
capacity houses. They were new, raw musicals that owed very little to the pop
opera or Tin Pan Alley tradition and they were developed in workshops OffBroadway. Rent received a particularly large amount of attention, as its
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creator Jonathan Larson died suddenly during its downtown preview. The
show drew a new, young audience (the subway ads appealed to customers
who “hate musicals”), won the major awards, and seemed on its way to
becoming an international phenomenon.
Rent also produced a literal change in the Broadway landscape. It opened
on Forty-first Street, formerly a No Man’s Land, as was anything south of Fortysecond Street. But Forty-second Street, indeed, the entire Theatre District,
has changed in a way that would have stupefied the apprehensive urban
dwellers of the early seventies. Encouraged by its 1995 success in bringing to
Broadway a stage version of its animated film Beauty and the Beast, the Walt
Disney Company purchased and renovated Ziegfeld’s New Amsterdam
Theater on Forty-second Street as a house for its own future projects. Its first
monumental production there in the fall of 1997 was a stage version of the animated film The Lion King, which was capitalized at an all-time high of more
than $20 million. On the same block, Canadian producer Garth Drabinsky and
his Livent, Inc. paid for a massive renovation of the Lyric and Apollo Theatres,
using Ford Motor Company as its corporate sponsor. Its premiere production
was a musical based on E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, which Drabinsky had
tried out in his own theatres in Toronto and Los Angeles. Both new theatres
have over 1,300 seats each. In addition, since 1995 the New Victory, also on
Forty-second Street, has been a viable and charming space for young audiences. With these renovations has come a plethora of new restaurants, chain
stores, neon lights, and coffee boutiques, giving the area a twenty-four-hour
sheen that has also driven the prostitutes, pimps, and panhandlers to points
beyond.
But with the success of such urban and commercial incentives has come a
number of disturbing paradoxes. On 18 June 1997, when Cats became the
longest running Broadway show of all time, there was little professional enthusiasm for celebrating a landmark that overturned A Chorus Line, the quintessential Broadway musical. In marked contrast to that show’s extraordinary
celebration in 1983, Cats merely roped off the street in front of the Winter
Garden for some speeches and a small parade. Even this event was trumped
by the Disney Company’s city-wide “Electrical Parade” to promote the
opening of the film Hercules only days before. Frank Rich, writing about
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s declining fortunes on the Op-Ed page of the New York
Times, 17 June 1997, observed: “The man who Disneyfied the Broadway
musical has been downsized by Disneyfication.”
The paradoxes continued at the close of the 1998 season: Broadway box
office grosses set a record, reaching a total of $557 million. This was an 11.6
percent rise from the previous season’s attendance record. However, only two
shows that had opened during the 1997–98 season could be called hits. One
of them was Art, a three-person play imported from London, and a one-man
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show by performance artist John Leguizamo (Freak). Among productions that
flopped was a holdover from the previous season called The Life, a wellreviewed musical, ironically celebrating the prostitutes, pimps, and panhandlers that used to inhabit Forty-second Street in the seventies. The show lost
$6 million.
Even the extraordinary successes of The Lion King and Ragtime were not
without their bleak sides. The Disney Company admitted that their huge
success would not show a profit for a long time, although, given its critical
success and family appeal, its chances of a long, healthy run are virtually
assured. Ragtime by the end of 1998 was playing to capacity houses, although
Livent, Inc. lost $50 million in other operations over the previous fifteen
months, leading to a takeover by Hollywood impresario Michael Ovitz, which
relegated Drabinsky to a smaller role in the company.4 Of the additional $58
million increase in Broadway income from 1997, $44 million came solely from
The Lion King and Ragtime.
Such feast-or-famine economics created a new way of doing business on
Broadway. Road productions increased their box office income exponentially.
1997–98 income from the Road was nearly $800 million. In fact, the quality of
Road productions has improved so much that producers on the Road charge
ticket prices close to those on Broadway. In the wake of increased attention
from Hollywood and television shows, Broadway is trying to capture the more
sophisticated commericial techniques of those media. “Theatre has been a
wonderful cottage industry, but always twenty or thirty years behind the
times,” says Michael David of Dodger Productions. Into the vacuum of
Broadway producers in the David Merrick mode have come large diverse companies like Disney, that have deeper pockets than someone like Merrick could
have possibly imagined. Whether this will only widen the gap between shows
that struggle to survive and expensive shows that can be run for months at a
loss in order to show a profit remains to be seen. What is undeniably true,
however, is that everyone on Broadway in the late nineties looks to these corporate experiments with more enthusiasm than skepticism.
Conclusion and Forecast
“When I was growing up,” related George Furth, a Broadway actor in the fifties
and sixties, and the author of the book to Company, “we went to the theater
to be enlightened and the movies to be entertained. Now, it’s the other way
around.”5 Broadway is no longer the place where important topics are tackled
and discussed first. That role has been ceded to film, or more accurately, to
independent film. True, there isn’t much serious drama on Broadway, but
there hasn’t been for forty years, since the clearly exceptional heyday of
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Williams and Miller. Perhaps it is time for Broadway to reimagine itself more
realistically. In spite of the lack of serious drama, and the gargantuan size and
expense of a few Broadway musicals, Broadway still seems to be the destination for theatre artists at the top of their craft. From all over the world they
will eventually come to Broadway. The 1997–98 season hosted, among its
thirty-two shows, an all-Irish company performing a new play by Martin
McDonagh (The Beauty Queen of Leenane); Art, written by a French playwright
and adapted to English, with an American cast; Freak with Leguizamo, an
acclaimed Latino actor; and the Broadway debut of director-designer Julie
Taymor, one of Off-Broadway’s leading avant-garde artists, hired by Disney to
reconceive The Lion King for the stage. A savvy choice by Disney. The New
Amsterdam thus became home for both an avant-garde puppeteer and a multimillion-dollar corporation.
Even a brief stay on Broadway still raises the artistic and commercial
profile of a play, artist, or production group. Perhaps the time has come, as
Linda Winer wrote in Newsday, for Broadway to “embrace its evolved identity
as a showcase for works hearty enough to make their way there” (quoted in
Guernsey and Sweet, Best Plays of 1995–1996, 47 ). With the massive changes
of the information age, the expanding markets and marketing of Hollywood
and television will be an ongoing and increasing presence on Broadway. The
hermetic world of the theatre can no longer afford to shut out its most
obstreperous competitors. It would be a futile struggle in any event.
Broadway, as it stretches toward the twenty-first century, has become an
unapologetic open-air theatrical market for goods of all kinds. Perhaps it may
be hawking more of the “hip hooray and bally-hoo” than more sober critics
would prefer, but that has always been the most seductive strain of the lullaby
of old Broadway.
Notes
1 See Morrow, The Tony Award Book, 23–27, and Atkinson, Broadway (revised edition),
530.
2 The tracking of album sales is a tricky one. Unlike producers, who routinely issue
box office grosses, record companies are notoriously reticent to make sales units
public. Billboard magazine, the record industry journal, has kept note of “charts,”
i.e., a listing of, say, the top twenty-five best-selling albums for a given week, etc.
Trying to track the success of the original cast album of My Fair Lady requires some
extrapolation. According to Jack Whitburn’s Top Pop Albums: ’55–’92, My Fair Lady
spent 480 weeks on Billboard’s charts (making it the third longest-selling album).
This is an impressive achievement, when one considers that, first of all, the album
was competing against pop stars like Elvis Presley and (eventually) The Beatles.
Also, until the early sixties, the charts stayed at fifteen, twenty-five, or fifty positions
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(there are 200 positions now), so to stay on the charts for My Fair Lady’s first five
years meant staying in rather select company.
The economic relation of cast albums to Broadway has, to my knowledge, gone
completely unexplored. But, again, if one extrapolates, there was not only an original (mono) Broadway cast album for My Fair Lady, there was a stereo version, a
London cast album, a movie soundtrack, a revival recording from 1977, a “crossover” album with Kiri Te Kanawa, and innumerable cover recordings of the songs.
So, perhaps Lerner’s numbers are not off the charts, as it were. Nevertheless, it
should be apparent to even the most ingenuous reader that there was an immense
amount of money to be made with a successful Broadway musical.
3 This is an average of data from the Theatre Development Fund, comparing their
gross ticket sales to the gross box office receipts of the last six Broadway seasons
(i.e., through 1996–97).
4 Editors’ note: after completion of this essay, Drabinsky and Ron Gottlieb, his cofounder of Livent, were ousted from the company in 1998 and indicted on various
fraud and conspiracy charges in the U.S. and Canada. As of May 1999 the outcome
of these indictments had not been determined.
5 Drawn from Furth’s conversation with the author. Although I have seen most of what
was interesting of Broadway since 1974, Mr. Furth, along with Anne Kaufman
Schneider, and the press agent Robert Ullman, have shared their thoughts and perspectives on all the shows I did not see that they did, which often seemed like every
Broadway production since 1940. My thanks to these three great resources.
Bibliography: Broadway
Any attempt to coordinate the multifarious events on Broadway during this period
would bring one inevitably – and quickly – to the Best Plays series, which has been the
chronicle and reference guide to every Broadway season for the past seventy-seven
years. All productions that opened on Broadway (eventually Off-Broadway and major
regional theatre as well), casts lists, number of performances, and so forth, are in these
redoubtable volumes. For this period, the editorship shifted from Burns Mantle
(1920–47) to John Chapman (1948–52), Louis Kronenberger (1953–61), and Henry
Hewes. With Best Plays of 1965–1966 Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. took over the editorship and
has continued it until the present day (Jeffrey Sweet became associate editor in 1986).
Guernsey’s prefaces are key for their introduction of financial figures from the industry and “off-stage” news. (These prefaces were anthologized in Curtain Times in 1987,
which have some new and useful commentary by Guernsey.) I have used box office
gross figures from these volumes, which, in turn, are compiled from Variety.
(Annoyingly, these figures have been dropped from the last three editions.) There are
a number of other places from which one can get box office figures – the League of
Theatre Producers, the New York State Attorney General’s Office – but Variety is consistent and relatively non-partisan. The Best Plays series can be nicely supplemented
by the annual Theatre World series, edited by John Willis, which has statistics, minimal
text, and many photographs.
The business part of show business during this period has been astonishingly
underreported, especially when one considers the plethora of books about the film
industry. Erring on the “show” side, Atkinson’s Broadway is a beautifully written, often
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elegiac study by one of the greatest critics of the twentieth century, and frequently
addresses industry issues. It’s a Hit! The “Back Stage” Book of Longest Running
Broadway Shows by Sheward is an indispensable volume: well-illustrated, temperate
in its conclusions, impeccable in its accuracy. Fehl’s On Broadway is a delightful photographic album of the early part of this period, with many insightful quotes from the
shows and their creators. As far as the “business” side goes, one volume towers above
the rest: Goldman’s The Season (the 1984 revised edition has a wonderful introduction
by Frank Rich). Goldman’s “candid look at Broadway” covers every show on stage and
many of the machinations backstage during the 1967–68 season. It reads like a novel,
is highly opinionated, and a wonderful barometer of the times. Sad to say, there is no
book in its league, nor a sequel. Other books that mix a little commerce into the art are
Harris’s Broadway Theatre, Sponberg’s Broadway Talks, and Mordden’s The American
Theatre, the last of which blurs the line between idiosyncratic and eccentric prose.
There are a few biographical volumes of note concerning the principals of this
period, although there are obviously more to come. David Merrick deserves a more
exacting valediction than Kissel’s David Merrick: The Abominable Showman, but
Harold Prince’s career is well appraised by Foster Hirsch in Harold Prince and the
American Musical Theatre, as is Michael Bennett’s by Mandelbaum in A Chorus Line and
the Musicals of Michael Bennett. Mandelbaum also contributed a somewhat recondite
but fascinating book, which gives great insight into the industry, the self-explanatory
Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops. Among memoirs, recommended are Lerner’s fanciful account of his life, The Street Where I Live, and Prince’s
Contradictions, which is schematic and abrupt, but a wonderful peregrination through
the mind of a producer.
As far as periodicals go, in preparing this chapter I have erred on the side of the New
York Times, but, certainly since 1965, no paper has been as extensive, thorough, critical (and powerful), especially when Walter Kerr (1966–93) and Frank Rich (1980–93)
were writing reviews, editorials, and features. Rich’s New York Times Magazine article
“Exit the Critic” (13 February 1994) is the best overview of the 1980s I have read. Variety
is also indispensable, especially under the recent editorship of its “Legitimate” section
by Jeremy Gerard. American Theater magazine seems to regard Broadway, commercialism, and entertainment with some distaste, so is not particularly useful for this
subject. TheaterWeek, during the brief seven years of its existence (1989–96), was at
its best when dealing with Broadway gossip, of which it covered a great deal. The
Theatre on Tape and Film Archive at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center has
a burgeoning collection of taped Broadway shows from the mid-seventies on, as well
as many interviews and documentaries, and is definitely worth a perusal.
Off- and Off-Off Broadway
Mel Gussow
Beginnings
Both Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway began with similar intentions, as the
antidote to the mainstream and the marketplace. The limitations of Broadway
led directly to the creation of Off-Broadway, and the subsequent drift toward
commercialism of Off-Broadway led to the creation of Off-Off Broadway, which
in a sense was the alternative to the alternative (see Carlson below for more
on “Alternative Theatre”). In other words, inaction bred reaction. At some
point, this double-barreled dose of non-traditional theatre became the artistic core of the American theatre. As Broadway productions became increasingly expensive and as the megamusical monopolized theatres and curtailed
the opportunities for experimentation, the emphasis turned away from
Broadway. It was in the other arena (and regional theatre) that almost all the
significant events and trends occurred and where new plays, playwrights,
directors, and actors were discovered. It is also where there were experimentations with new forms of theatre.
In some cases, the talent moved to Broadway and into films and television
and an international spotlight. But Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway are not
simply a training ground: they are a wellspring for the innovative.
Performance art, the use of the artist’s self in performance, was born here; as
was the idea of environmental theatre, and the merging of theatre, music,
dance, and the visual arts (including film and video).
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller emerged on Broadway in the forties,
but, from the fifties onward the important new American playwrights (Edward
Albee, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, David Rabe, John Guare,
Wallace Shawn, Terrence McNally, Wendy Wasserstein, David Henry Hwang,
Mac Wellman, and others) were nurtured in this arena, as were many of
America’s finest actors (Geraldine Page, Colleen Dewhurst, George C. Scott,
Jason Robards, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall,
Kevin KIine, Meryl Streep). It also provided a home for indigenous writers and
directors (Richard Foreman, Charles Ludlam) and performers (David
Warrilow, Craig Smith, Lola Pashalinski, and Jeff Weiss). Some artists stayed
there and others periodically returned, but the effect of Off-Broadway and OffOff Broadway is inestimable.
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Off-Broadway, of course, can be traced back to the days of Eugene O’Neill
and his residency with the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village in the
early part of the twentieth century. At various times, the Washington Square
Players and Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre also presented plays
in this area. But it was not until the fifties that Off-Broadway became a fullscale movement and a permanent part of the theatrical landscape.
Distinctions
Off-Off Broadway was its natural outgrowth. Largely for economic reasons,
theatres began in unlikely locations: storefronts, lofts, basements, and coffeehouses. These were not only shoestring operations; often they were threadbare. Gradually, working conditions improved, seats became more
comfortable and public awareness increased (and ticket prices increased).
Without regard for critics, a devoted audience sprung up, supporting favored
artists and often filling theatres before reviews (if any) were published.
Although Off- and Off-Off Broadway were eventually undercut by reductions
in support from foundations, both public and private, and by other economic
pressures, and by the coopting of talent by other areas of the performing arts,
they have managed to remain the heartline of creativity. The primary reason
for the continuing vitality of this arena is the dedication of individuals, the
people who began and in many cases carried on the mission of art against the
marketplace.1
Definition remains difficult. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway are states
of mind, not rigidly drawn geographic sectors. Although the primary concentration of houses is still in Greenwich Village and the East Village, theatres
spread out through Manhattan and into other boroughs. Union regulations, as
designated by Actors’ Equity, control salaries according to the seating capacity of Off-Broadway theatres (100 to 299 seats), and with Off-Off Broadway also
limit the number of performances. In these theatres, profits are seldom made
(although there have been some long-running money-making successes OffBroadway and transfers to more profitable venues). In the earliest days,
actors and others passed the hat after performances, soliciting contributions
from the audience. As the movement grew, theatres became institutionalized
and a network of non-profit companies grew (as it also did around the country
with the proliferation of regional theatres; see LoMonaco below).
At the same time, there was movement from one area to the other, as plays
originally produced Off-Off shifted into full-fledged Off-Broadway commercial
surroundings, just as Off-Broadway plays ended up on Broadway. Some, like
Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, made the transition all the way from OffOff Broadway to Broadway, where in 1983 it won a Tony Award as best play.
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Similarly, companies like the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Circle
Repertory Company began Off-Off Broadway, then with continuing success
grew to Off-Broadway status. Subsequently, the Manhattan Theatre Club
became even more successful and edged closer to Broadway, while the Circle
Rep, fallen on hard times, retreated and then went out of business in October
1996.
The word alternative, often applied to Off- and Off-Off Broadway, should be
taken literally: at their best, Off- and Off-Off are for themselves; they are not,
or rather should not be, conduits to commercialism, though accidently some
ventures there have proven to be profitable. The experimentation in this area
had its obvious international influences: Antonin Artaud, Vsevolod
Meyerhold, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and, in more recent times, Peter Brook and
Jerzy Grotowski. It is where the avant-garde comes to practice its art. (In the
last section of this chapter, Carlson discusses in more detail alternative
theatre in the United States.)
Many individuals have made significant contributions but two figures, both
essentially producers, stand the tallest: Joseph Papp, the godfather of OffBroadway, and Ellen Stewart, the mother, La Mama of Off-Off Broadway. (See
the first section of this chapter for Papp’s contributions to Broadway.)
Joseph Papp and Ellen Stewart
Papp did not invent Off-Broadway. Modern Off-Broadway, as we know it, began
in 1952 with Theodore Mann and José Quintero and the creation of Circle in
the Square. But during his lifetime, Papp (1921–91) was the soul and constantly shifting center of Off-Broadway. Similarly, Stewart did not initiate OffOff Broadway. As she has always acknowledged, that honor goes to Joe Cino,
who opened Caffe Cino in 1959. It was La Mama who became – and as of 1999
still is – the messianic heart of the movement. The American theatre is doubly
indebted to Papp and Stewart.
Emerging from television, where he was a stage manager, Papp was the
inspirational force behind free Shakespeare. He also strove to liberate theatre
from the stranglehold of Broadway producers and theatre owners. Battling
with city authorities, in particular Robert Moses, the all-controlling New York
parks commissioner, Papp brought the itinerant New York Shakespeare
Festival to Central Park, and declared that he was going to stay there. This was
not the first location for Papp’s apparent pipe dream of bringing classics to
the people, but it became its permanent summer setting (eventually in the
Delacorte Theatre). A rugged individualist, who challenged authority while
assuming his own authority, Papp went from outsider to insider in a very
short space of time.
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His program of free Shakespeare led directly to his creation of the Public
Theater, a multi-theatre structure that he opened in 1967 in the former Astor
Library on Astor Place near the Bowery. The Public was soon filled with
energy and theatrical life, from Hair, the counterculture musical by Gerome
Ragni, James Rado, and Galt MacDermot (which opened the new theatre),
through plays by David Rabe, Michael Weller, Thomas Babe, Wallace Shawn,
and other homegrown talents – and always including Shakespeare. Papp
believed wholeheartedly in renegade writers, those who challenged tradition
and the political status quo. When he brought a playwright into his family, he
supported him even to the extent of producing lesser or unfinished work. His
investment was more in the playwright than in the play.
Calling upon his youthful background as a political rebel, he favored plays
with a social consciousness. More than many producers, he brought in works
by black and Hispanic writers (Charles Gordone, Ntozake Shange, Miguel
Piñero) that spoke with rage about restrictions they faced in their lives. Rabe,
with his anger (and his artistry) about hopeless wars, in plays like The Basic
Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), Sticks and Bones (1971), and Streamers
(1976), became his house playwright. If Papp were a playwright, he would
have hoped to be Rabe.
Despite a reluctance to produce plays by English writers (with the definite
exception of Shakespeare, David Hare, and Caryl Churchill), he consistently
presented the work of Vaclav Havel, giving him an American forum even as he
was imprisoned in his native Czechoslovakia. At the same time, Papp had a
love of theatre for theatre’s sake, and for a change of pace would put on works
of entertainment, like The Pirates of Penzance (1980), one of his many collaborations with Wilford Leach, who for many years was Papp’s principal director. British writer Arthur Wing Pinero’s Trelawney of the Wells (1898), Papp’s
favorite backstage comedy, shared the theatre with Miguel Piñero’s streetsmart dramas like Short Eyes. The stagestruck Papp himself performed a
cabaret show (not at the Public), singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”,
which might be considered his signature song: beg, borrow, badger, anything
to keep his theatre in business, anything, that is, except compromise what he
regarded as his principles. On several occasions, he rejected financial support
for what he considered to be ethical reasons.
Although Papp was never able to create an American style of
Shakespearean performance or an American Shakespeare company, he did
give such individuals as George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, James Earl Jones,
Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep, Stacy Keach, and Raul Julia ample opportunity to
demonstrate their prowess with Shakespeare. He was a pioneer in what is frequently termed non-traditional casting, freely mixing actors of various races,
especially in Shakespeare. Using a variety of directors, including Gerald
Freedman and later Wilford Leach – and sometimes himself – he presented
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productions that ran the gamut from imaginative to negligible, but always
emphasizing that his was an open theatre where anything could be tried.
Looking back on his time at the Shakespeare Festival as a high point of his professional life, Scott credited Papp with ruthlessness as well as dedication and
said that he was devoted to an ideal and would “not let anything stand in his
way.” He added, “Thank God he’s only in the theatre.”
Through the years, Papp increased his power, adding Lincoln Center and
Broadway to his annexations (after four seasons, he left Lincoln Center,
keeping only his Public Theater home base). A Chorus Line, which began as a
Michael Bennett workshop for dancers at the Public, opened downtown in
1975 and then moved to the Shubert Theatre on Broadway, where it won a
Pulitzer Prize and with its unique premise became a turning point in American
musical theatre (see Chapter 4). During its long run, it was also the greatest
source of income for the Shakespeare Festival. In emulation (and envy) of
Papp, other companies began looking for another A Chorus Line to free themselves from economic woes. Even Papp looked for another windfall. But A
Chorus Line was one of a kind. With Bennett’s early death in 1987 from AIDS,
it also stood as the director’s legacy.
Papp himself stirred anger and resentment, for his stubbornness and for
closing the door to artists outside of his ken, or at least for not letting other
feet in the door. When he died in 1991, Papp’s funeral was held at the Public
Theater, and, as befitting the producer, it became a theatrical event: a public
wailing wall at which people bore witness to his years and, in some cases, to
his limitations. Artists he supported begrudged the fact that he had not given
them artistic tenure in his house. The Dramatists Guild announced that its
members had “sustained a grave loss,” and added, “He was impulsive, mercurical [sic] and grandiose, but he was a generous and loving promoter of our
plays wherever he found them” (New York Times obituary, 2 November 1991).
Papp was certainly “mercurical.” As he said, “I can bend, backtrack, switch
directions, do this or that, whatever is necessary – in order to survive. My
tactics, out of necessity, keep changing, but my direction has never changed:
new plays, new audiences” (Gussow, cover story, New York Times Magazine,
9 November 1975). That could in fact serve as his epitaph. Whatever criticism
accrued to the Papp years, he made an enormous contribution and was the
most powerful and influential man in American theatre.
Reluctantly, Papp had named a successor: JoAnne Akalaitis, one of the
founders of the innovative performance art troupe Mabou Mines. After Papp
died, Akalaitis took over the Shakespeare Festival, but with only a brief
chance to prove her mettle, as she was summarily dismissed in 1993 by her
board of directors and replaced by George C. Wolfe. Wolfe, who had worked
at the Public as a director and playwright (The Colored Museum in 1986),
immediately put his own signature on the Festival especially by stressing
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questions of ethnicity, in the audience as well as the artists. In honor of its
founder, the theatre was renamed the Joseph Papp Public Theater, but the
spirit of its founder was missing. Papp was, of course, irreplaceable.
At least on a par with Papp in terms of significance was Ellen Stewart, the
earth mother of the American theatre, the indomitable, indefatigable – she
earned those adjectives – La Mama, the promulgator of pushcart theatre who
became a theatrical figure of world importance. While others theorized about
the need for a poor theatre, Stewart did something about it. Anyone could
have a play done at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. With a true sense of
democracy, she did not express her artistic taste but simply welcomed everyone, and at first anyone: in this sense she was the direct opposite of Papp and
most other artistic directors. With a certain pride, Stewart said that she did
not read scripts. She “read” people, she heard “vibes,” investing herself and
her energy in artists whom she thought were worth encouraging.
A former clothing designer and before that an elevator operator in a department store, she began her first theatre with seeming casualness, as a place to
do plays by her brother and Paul Foster, a friend and incipient playwright.
Conquering bureaucracy and battling authorities who wanted to close her
operation for violating various city ordinances, she survived against all odds.
She began in a basement on East Ninth Street in Manhattan, then moved to a
loft, and finally, after years of struggle, to her long-term residency on East
Fourth Street. Eventually she buttressed her La MaMa theatres with the
Annex, a large adaptable space for more epic events, and she also began a
cabaret. As the unknown entered and then exited famous, Stewart remained
the essence of La MaMa.
A force of nature, she could talk anyone into anything. As she said, “If we
were sitting on our tails, waiting for someone to help us, we’d be nothing.
We’re like gypsies on the front lawn. We’re here!” Bargaining and even bullying her way into longevity, she became the surrogate parent and producer to
a battalion of domestic and international artists. Sam Shepard, Lanford
Wilson, Harvey Fierstein, Tom Eyen, Leonard Melfi, Ed Bullins, and JeanClaude Van Itallie had their early plays done here, along with those by Harold
Pinter, Fernando Arrabal, and Samuel Beckett; the composer Elizabeth
Swados, the director Tom O’Horgan, actors like Bette Midler, Robert De Niro,
and Diane Lane began their careers at La MaMa. Directors came from abroad:
Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Andrei Serban (and Serban
stayed, to become the foundation stone of a La MaMa acting company).
Stewart traveled. Her journeys in pursuit of art took her around the world,
from Israel to Argentina, where she established satellite La MaMas and spread
the word and the talent, and became an unofficial ambassador of the performing arts.
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When she was in New York, she would walk on stage before a performance,
ring her trademark cowbell, and declare that La MaMa ETC was devoted “to
the playwright and all aspects of the theatre.” Generally, she would not stay
to watch the show, although she sometimes returned for the final performance. Even as she began to stage plays herself, her role remained indefinable. Technically, she was a producer or presenter, but what she did went far
deeper than that. La MaMa was the quintessence of the experimental theatre
and for her many contributions Stewart was given a so-called genius award by
the MacArthur Foundation. In Who’s Who in the Theatre it says quite plainly
that her company had “a profound effect on theatre throughout the world,”
and that “her own influence probably exceeds that of any other twentiethcentury theatre figure.”
Development of Off-Broadway
The chronology of the Off-Broadway movement began before Papp and
Stewart, with Circle in the Square, which Mann and Quintero, as noted earlier,
created in 1951 in Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. The following year,
Circle in the Square began auspiciously with a revival of Tennessee Williams’s
Summer and Smoke, a failure on Broadway in 1948. Quintero’s revival, starring
a radiant new actress, Geraldine Page, established her, the director, and the
theatre, and found a new dimension for the playwright. As with later productions, Quintero’s magic was largely one of fidelity and intimacy, of bringing a
play back to its roots. Sitting around the stage on four sides – still an innovation in its time – theatregoers eavesdropped on Alma Winemiller and her
neighbors. Summer and Smoke seeped in.
Something similar could be said about the Circle in the Square’s revival of
Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh in 1956. It was O’Neill more than anyone
else who had been responsible for the birth of the original Off-Broadway, and
now, after his death, he became the catalyst in the re-emergence of the OffBroadway movement. As with Summer and Smoke, The Iceman Cometh had
failed on Broadway (in 1946) and had been marked as one of a highly regarded
playwright’s lesser works. Quintero and his astonishing star, Jason Robards,
changed all that. Harry Hope’s dead end saloon, a landscape of shattered
dreams, came seethingly to life at the Circle. Lives and reputations changed,
and the success soon encouraged the Circle’s move to Broadway with
O’Neill’s posthumous masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The
company performed similar feats with other writers like Thornton Wilder
(with Plays for Bleecker Street) and gave Dustin Hoffman one of his earliest
showcases (1966) in the English play Eh? by Henry Livings.
Circle in the Square moved from its original home in Sheridan Square to a
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new location on Bleecker Street, and finally to Broadway, in each stop trying
to duplicate its first situation, with the audience surrounding the play.
Quintero left, and Mann carried on. The company had its failures as well as its
successes; its glory time was Off-Broadway in the early eventful years. In
those days there was a healthy sense of family throughout Off-Broadway.
Actors like George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst brought their magnetism to
Circle in the Square and to the New York Shakespeare Festival, moving freely
from one to the other, as the territory seemed to explode with talent. Similarly,
James Earl Jones packed a half dozen roles into a single Off-Broadway season.
He never stopped working, along with his peers, brightening many stages. The
late fifties and on to the sixties were a halcyon time in the life of the American
theatre.
Politics and social awareness always played an important role OffBroadway, never more so than with the Living Theatre. As invented by Julian
Beck and Judith Malina, the Living Theatre (“le Living” as it was known in
France) was the radical conscience and agent provocateur of the American
theatre. Explaining the choice of name, Malina said the word “living” was
meant “not so much in terms of lively, though there certainly is that hope, but
more in the sense of being flexible and responsive. We wanted to create a
theatre that can say something whether we are playing in an opera house in
Italy or in the favelas of Brazil, in prisons when we are prisoners or in the
streets.”
Repeatedly embroiled in storms of controversy, Beck and Malina refused to
compromise their principles. Although the Becks could trace the origins of
the Living Theatre back to 1948, it was not until they produced Jack Gelber’s
The Connection in their theatre on West Fourteenth Street in 1959 that they
broke through with their message (another perspective on the Living Theatre
and The Connection is provided by Carlson in the last section of this chapter).
Gelber’s graphic simulation of reality stirred theatregoers (and dismayed its
initial critics) with its Beckettian story of drug addicts waiting for their fix.
Gelber was one of a trio of new writers to make their debut Off-Broadway at
the time, and to alert the theatrical world to the boldness of their work. The
others were Edward Albee, with The Zoo Story, and Jack Richardson with The
Prodigal, both in the 1959–60 season, and they were followed in 1962 by Arthur
Kopit with his Absurdist romp, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the
Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (starring Jo Van Fleet and Barbara Harris).
Although Richardson turned to other pursuits, Gelber and Kopit continued to
be active in theatre, and Albee, with his move to Broadway with Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf?, became a seminal force in the new American theatre.
Subsequently, he too returned to Off-Broadway.
As for the Living Theatre, it continued its iconoclastic path with Kenneth
H. Brown’s The Brig in 1963, a brutal slice of Marine life (see Carlson below).
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Repeatedly, the Living Theatre accosted its patrons. Besieged for nonpayment of taxes, it eventually left America to lead a nomadic existence in
Europe, returning, in 1968, with the epic Paradise Now and then, after another
absence, coming back to New York in the mid-eighties. Beck and Malina
believed forthrightly that art, in particular, theatre, could alter society. As
Beck said on returning to America, “Art opens perception and changes our
vision. I think that without art we would all remain blind to reality. We go to
the theater to study ourselves. The theater excites the imagination, and it also
enters the spirit” (New York Times, 15 January 1984). After Beck’s death in
1985, the Living Theatre continued under the direction of Malina and Hanon
Reznikov.
Other Off-Broadway Pioneers
Equally consequential, in a different way, was the consortium formed by producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder and playwright Edward Albee. They
began Off-Broadway in 1960 with two one-acts, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last
Tape and Albee’s The Zoo Story, a seminal moment in contemporary theatre.
That was followed by other important innovative work at the Cherry Lane and
other theatres (including works by Albee as well as the blistering Dutchman
by Amiri Baraka, né Leroi Jones). Eventually, Barr and his partners did most
of their work on Broadway, but, with profits from their productions, the trio
initiated the Playwrights Unit, an invaluable new playwrights’ workshop.
Through this workshop, Albee was followed by Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson,
Mart Crowley (author of The Boys in the Band in 1968, the first commercially
successful play about the problems of gay men) and many others.
Under this and other managements, Off-Broadway offered adventurous
plays by Beckett, Jean Genet (The Maids, Deathwatch, The Blacks, The
Balcony), Eugène Ionesco (The Bald Soprano), Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter,
and others.
Furthermore, the openness of Off-Broadway made room for such apparent
anomalies as David Ross, who in the late fifties and early sixties created an
Off-Broadway outpost for classics in his theatre on East Fourth Street (and,
later, on West Fifty-fifth Street). Presenting plays by Chekhov and Ibsen, featuring new and talented actors, Ross educated and uplifted a generation of
theatregoers. “My plays have never died,” he said. “When I commit myself in
terms of my art to Chekhov or Ibsen, it’s like Rubinstein committing himself
to an all Chopin program.” Then turning against what he saw as a craze for
newness, he said, “You think greatness can be produced every year? The great
ones stand all alone. The classic to me is the newness” (Newsweek, 10 October
1962).
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Seeking classics, audiences also had the option of the Association of
Producing Artists (the APA), Ellis Rabb’s touring company of actors (including, most notably, Rosemary Harris, George Grizzard, Nancy Marchand, and
Rabb himself). The APA followed what was becoming a standard route,
moving from Off-Broadway to Broadway. Similarly, there was the Phoenix
Theatre, which Norris Houghton and T. Edward Hambleton began in 1953 with
Madam, Will You Walk?, starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Emulating
European theatres, the Phoenix presented works by Brecht, Pirandello, and
O’Casey, among many others. Montgomery Clift did The Seagull, Robert Ryan
was in Coriolanus, Uta Hagen and Zero Mostel did The Good Woman of Setzuan,
and Irene Worth and Eva Le Gallienne were in Mary Stuart. In 1964, the APA and
the Phoenix merged, and finally ended their operation in 1970.
Eventually, a network of small classic companies sprang up: the Classic
Stage Company (founded by Christopher Martin and continuing through
several changes in directors), the Roundabout Theatre Company, the Jean
Cocteau (with its leading actor, Craig Smith), and the Pearl Theatre Company.
The Roundabout is a good example of the evolutionary aspect of theatre. It
began in 1965 in a basement theatre under a supermarket, then moved to a
medium size Off-Broadway theatre, and in 1991 transferred to Broadway,
where it has two stages (as of 1999 another move is planned). As the
Roundabout grew, it also improved. What was once a variety of community
theatre was quickly replaced by professionalism: name actors and directors
in established classics, and, occasionally, new plays.
Emergence of Off-Off Broadway
For all the José Quinteros and Davis Rosses, Off-Broadway also had its own
instincts for commercialism, at least partly because of the lower economic
factors. Although Off-Broadway is commonly regarded as an arena for nonprofit theatre, that is only a part of the whole. As on Broadway, some theatre
buildings (like the Promenade on upper Broadway) became prime real estate
properties, and profits are made from long-running shows. A musical could be
small yet attract a large audience. Shows like Little Mary Sunshine (1959) and
Little Shop of Horrors (1982) found an enthusiastic public and moved into long
runs. The Fantasticks (by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt) defeated mixed
reviews in 1960 to become the longest running musical of all time, while The
Threepenny Opera opened in 1955 and ran for seven years. Others like Hair, A
Chorus Line, Godspell (which began at La MaMa), and Grease, shifted to
Broadway. Drama and comedy, from Other People’s Money to A. R. Gurney’s
Sylvia, have been successes and encouraged duplication of the plays at
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regional theatres. As Off-Broadway expanded its role, it became, to a certain
degree, a smaller version of Broadway.
As production costs increased, there was a need for forays further into the
world of non-profit. The result received the unwieldy label of Off-Off
Broadway, representing another step away from Broadway. Despite additional
inroads of commercialism, no third “Off” was added to the nomenclature.
Although Joe Cino is the recorded progenitor of Off-Off, it was a synchronicity of events that created the movement. While Cino was serving theatre to
his patrons in his café on Cornelia Street, Ralph Cook was welcoming artists
to Theatre Genesis at St. Mark’s in the Bowerie, and Larry Kornfeld and Al
Carmines were opening the doors at the Judson Memorial Church. These
various groups shared talents. Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Jean-Claude Van
Itallie, and others moved from place to place along with actors, directors, and
designers. In other words, there was great creative ferment and also a cooperative instinct: a movement was born, and it was one that was to change the
face of the American theatre.
Cino, an affable, gregarious man, was the first to put out his shingle, in
December 1958, turning Caffe Cino into his own personalized, idiosyncratic
coffeehouse theatre. The range of plays was as wide as Cino’s smile: from
Dames at Sea, a nostalgic spoof of the musicals of the thirties (a show that was
later to make its way around the world) to early plays by H.M. Koutoukas, Tom
Eyen (Why Hannah’s Skirt Won’t Stay Down), Robert Patrick, Robert Heide, and
Lanford Wilson. Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright was typical of the adventurous fare on Cino’s menu: an empathetic look at the loneliness of an aging
homosexual (played by Neil Flanagan).
As described in The Off-Off Broadway Book by Albert Poland and Bruce
Mailman, Caffe Cino was “dark, smoky, cluttered and dirty. The walls were
covered with posters, old photographs, crunched foil, glitter stars and hundreds of pieces of assorted memorabilia” (xvii). There was no admission
charge and contributions were solicited from the audience to pay for the
actors. With no public or private support, Caffe Cino had “no obligations
other than to itself.” When Cino killed himself in 1967, it was a tragic loss for
his friends and also for Off-Off Broadway.
An equally evocative figure was Al Carmines, the assistant minister (to
Howard Moody) at Judson Church. Carmines, an ebullient musical talent,
wrote the score to a cornucopia of musicals, some of them based on the work
of Gertrude Stein, others, like A Look at the Fifties, drawn from his own
memory and imagination. In his own way, as composer and lyricist, Carmines
became the Rodgers and Hammerstein of Off-Off Broadway. Simultaneously,
Ralph Cook made Theatre Genesis a center of experimentation. As he said,
“The playwright had complete freedom to offend and to disgust our audiences
– but they’ll keep coming back. It’s only because of this that we’re having a
renaissance of theatre.”
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Shepard, Chaikin, Wilson, Mamet
Among Cook’s favorites was Sam Shepard, a former busboy at the Village
Gate, who entered the theatre in his early twenties and threatened to revolutionize it. “Theater is a big bust,” he announced, “so old-fashioned, so steeped
in its tradition and its economics.” He vowed to “change the areas of reality
the audience brings into the theater” (Newsweek, 1 May 1967). In plays like
Cowboy Mouth and The Tooth of Crime, he linked theatre with the world of
rock’n’roll, while creating his own mythos of an America on the road to selfdestruction. Shepard became one of the most American of playwrights, the
poet of the outsider, as evoked through legend and a life on the open road.
Scores of his plays (Curse of the Starving Class, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind)
were done in the seventies and eighties Off-Broadway.
True West, a failure in its production at the Public Theater, was redone in
1982 by John Malkovich and Gary Sinise of the Steppenwolf Theatre of
Chicago in an electrifying Off-Broadway production that brought acclaim to
both the playwright and the Steppenwolf company. As with so many of his
contemporaries, Shepard made the transition from renegade to celebrity,
winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Buried Child (through its Off-Off production at Theatre for the New City), and moving on to Hollywood as actor,
writer, and director. It was not until Sinise brought the Steppenwolf revival of
Buried Child to New York in 1996 that Shepard was seen on Broadway. He
remains a quintessential Off-Broadway playwright.
Early in his career, Shepard began collaborating with Joseph Chaikin and
the Open Theatre (created in 1963 as a laboratory for actors). Shepard and
Chaikin continued that collaboration through the years, with plays like
Tongues and Savage/Love. The Open Theatre was itself a cornerstone of the
experimental theatre, with its ensemble creations like The Serpent (drawn
from the Book of Genesis) and Terminal (about ways of dying). Other playwrights who worked closely with the Open Theatre included Susan Yankowitz
and Jean-Claude Van Itallie, whose America, Hurrah! (an enraged look at
American consumerism) was widely acclaimed in 1966.
For Chaikin, the Open Theatre was partly a protest against the lack of
oxygen in the commercial theatre. As he said, “Training is absolutely the basis
of the work”; process was essential (New York Times, 12 July 1972). Even as
the Open Theatre ended its own run, its influence resonated through the work
of others, like Paul Zimet and the Talking Band. Along with other graduates of
the Open Theatre, Zimet carried on its goal. As with Chaikin, he blurred the
line between actors and authors: the work was genuinely collaborative by
nature. In the sixties there was a brief flare-up of political theatre, with
Martin Duberman’s In White America in 1963, Megan Terry’s Viet Rock in 1966,
followed the next year by Barbara Garson’s MacBird, a vituperative satiric
attack on President Lyndon Johnson.
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In 1969, Marshall W. Mason, Lanford Wilson, Tanya Berezin, and Rob
Thirkield founded the Circle Repertory Company, with high aesthetic principles. Mason, who became the artistic director, said that the company was “for
the needs of the artist, based on the relation between the actors and the playwright” (New York Times, 12 May 1974). From the beginning, the core of his
Off-Off Broadway company was Wilson himself, who emerged from America’s
heartland with stories of rebellion, families in conflict, and searchers for
meanings from the past.
Wilson’s first breakthrough came with The Hot l Baltimore, about the isolated, sometimes interwoven lives in an ungrand hotel. Wilson’s sense of
lyrical realism suffused this and other works, three of which centered on the
fictional Talley family (the two-hander, Talley’s Folly, with Judd Hirsch and
Trish Hawkins, became a Pulitzer Prize-winner in 1980). As with Shepard,
Wilson had a turning point when the Steppenwolf Theatre visited OffBroadway in 1984 with Malkovich’s striking production of an early, neglected
Wilson play, Balm in Gilead (with Sinise and Glenne Headly heading an ensemble cast). Mason had first staged the play in 1965 at La MaMa.
Later, Shepard and Wilson were followed by Mamet, who came from
Chicago with Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1975) and American Buffalo (1977),
winning a deserved reputation for his sharp-sighted observations of wheelers, dealers, and movers. Mamet leaped from Off-Off Broadway to Broadway
and then to the movies, while not neglecting his theatrical roots. Later plays
like Oleanna (1992) became long-running Off-Broadway hits, and a Mametinspired company, the Atlantic Theatre, presented plays by him and other
writers. (Mamet and other post-World War II writers are discussed in more
detail in Chapter 3.)
Long before Mamet came to New York, Chicago had sent its improvisational
troupe, the Second City, which, under the direction of Paul Sills, opened OffBroadway and later was seen on Broadway. With the Second City were such
outstanding performers as Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin, Paul Sand, and
Anthony Holland, who spread out through the New York theatre. Mike Nichols
and Elaine May, who had made their names with Second City’s predecessor,
the Compass Players, became famous as a double act in nightclubs and then
on Broadway. Each began a career as director (and in May’s case as a playwright) Off-Broadway.
Charles Ludlam, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Ping Chong,
John Kelly2
Continuity was established by people like Charles Ludlam and Richard
Foreman, each of whom invented an idea and, as author, director, and
company leader, created a living legacy.
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Ludlam’s invention in 1967 was the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.
Ridiculous theatre, a step beyond Absurd and a satiric style that mocked itself
as well as cultural detritus, was also practiced by John Vaccaro (the founder
of the Play-House of the Ridiculous) and the playwright Ronald Tavel, but
Ludlam polished it into a performance art. Beginning with plays like Bluebeard
(1970), and extending through dozens of other works, Ludlam spoofed everything already in an excessive mode: horror movies, opera, farce, melodrama.
He often called himself a theatrical ecologist, recycling old material, but he
became a true original; his portrait gallery is filled with comic grotesqueries:
clowns and emperors, the catarrhic Camille, a Promethean puppeteer, and a
virtuoso ventriloquist.
He also created actors, giving free rein to Black-Eyed Susan as leading lady,
Lola Pashalinski as queens and consorts, John D. Brockmeyer as the creepiest villain never to appear in a Frankenstein movie, and Ethyl Eichelberger, a
wizard of cross-dressing. Black-Eyed Susan, née Susan Carlson, could claim
the title of diva of Off-Off Broadway. A charming and deliriously amusing
actress, she brightened Ludlam’s comedies, as well as those by Eichelberger
(including Hamlette, a version of Hamlet, in which she played the title role),
John Jesurun, and others. As much as any theatre, the Ridiculous represented
the challenge of trying to survive. As Ludlam said, “One year, everyone in our
company was on welfare. We were on welfare until we got a Guggenheim” (New
York Times, 12 July 1972).3 Ludlam also gave the theatre Everett Quinton, his
protégé and co-star, who, after Ludlam’s death from AIDS in 1987, carried
forward the banner of the Ridiculous and became a first-rate director, playwright, and actor in his own right, while facing the struggle of surviving with
limited financial means.
Visionary and voyeur of his dreams and nightmares, Richard Foreman
founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre (in 1968) in his own image as OffOff Broadway’s poet-philosopher. As he said, “Art is trying to redeem, to learn
how to dance with the problematic aspects of the world. It’s easy enough to
imagine a beautiful world, and to celebrate it, but I would rather learn how to
celebrate the fallen world we live in” (New York Times, 17 January 1994). After
a formal education, which included study at Brown and the Yale School of
Drama, Foreman tried writing traditional plays, then drastically altered his
perspective. Inspired by underground filmmakers of the sixties, he became
one of the first and one of the longest running underground playmakers. With
the intricacy of a quantum physicist, he wove patterns on stage, intersecting
design elements like string and clocks, and transforming “clouds of language
and impulse” into a Caligarian, or rather, Foremanesque universe.
As director and as off-stage narrator with his deep sepulchral voice,
Foreman orchestrated his idiographic plays, which often starred Kate
Manheim, his favorite leading lady and later his wife. In plays like Rhoda in
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Potatoland, she played Foreman’s muse-like heroine Rhoda, dream woman
extraordinaire. Foreman’s plays (with devious titles like Pandering to the
Masses: A Misrepresentation; Book of Splendours: Part Two; Film Is Evil, Radio
Is Good, and My Head Was a Sledgehammer) are densely existential and also
playful, touched by vaudeville and silent comedy. Later, Foreman was to move
out and direct classical plays and operas on major stages, but always came
back to his roots. Establishing his Ontological-Hysteric chamber theatre in
1991 at St. Mark’s in the Bowerie, he continues to create his own inimitable
theatre pieces.
Robert Wilson, a native of Waco, Texas, began his notable career as director, conceptualist, and visual artist with marathon plays like Deafman Glance
(1970) and the dusk to dawn The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), which
encouraged theatregoers to tune in and out. Difficult and demanding, Wilson
sought the audience’s complicity – and people joined him on his journey, a
voyage in time and space. Creating phantasmagoric events, he is a kind of
colossus of performance art, influencing other creative artists: choreographers like Jerome Robbins as well as conceptual directors. In his unique
fashion, Wilson has explored the worlds of Freud, Lewis Carroll, Einstein, and
Stein, and, in his epic the CIVIL warS, war through history. Along with Foreman,
Lee Breuer, Martha Clarke, Fred Curchack, and others, he became a primary
proponent of the Theatre of Images. Some of those images impaled the minds
of theatregoers: such as the scene in Einstein on the Beach (a 1976 operatic
collaboration with Philip Glass) in which a pillar of white light rose from the
stage and disappeared into the sky, followed by the landing of a spaceship.
Because of the elaborateness and the expense of most Wilson productions,
they are presented for limited runs (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and
elsewhere), and not always in New York. Though he lives in New York, he has
found himself, more times than not, staging theatre pieces and his variations
on classic operas with great international opera companies or with regional
American companies, like the Alley Theatre in Houston.
In a different though related mode was Ping Chong, who at La MaMa and
elsewhere took theatregoers on epic excursions into artistic and literary
history, at first in tandem with Meredith Monk and subsequently with his own
company. With a wry humor and a beguiling sense of theatrics, he covered the
spectrum from the origins of man to outer space, often dealing with the
subject of the outsider in a society. In the nineties he began looking back at
Oriental myths and traditions in Deshima and Chinoiserie. John Kelly, in contrast, used himself as art object, in solo and group pieces, like Pass the
Blutwurst, Bitte, his extraordinary incarnation of the world of Egon Schiele.
Sometimes he performed in drag. In one play he posed as the Mona Lisa and
in another, Paved Paradise, he transformed himself into Joni Mitchell. Often in
song, always in flight, in common with other avant-garde artists, Kelly was his
own invention. Foreman, Wilson, Chong, Kelly, and others are sui generis.
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Groups and Artists
Taking their names from a town in Nova Scotia, a group of diverse theatre
artists (Lee Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, Philip Glass, and David
Warrilow) founded a cooperative company, Mabou Mines, in 1970 and quickly
became America’s foremost avant-garde troupe. Mabou Mines merged aesthetic experimentation with political awareness while creating a series of
haunting theatre pieces. Akalaitis took Colette on a fanciful trip in Dressed Like
an Egg, then looked back with skepticism at the origins of the atomic age in
Dead End Kids (1982). Breuer, as playful prankster, stir-fried his Animation
series, a Dadaesque canvas mixing animals and imagery. Together with the
composer Bob Telson, he created The Gospel at Colonus, a merging of classical Greek tragedy with contemporary gospel music. Restlessly inventive, he
presented in 1990 a female King Lear, starring Maleczech. Breuer and
Maleczech were also responsible for Haj, a multidimensional experiment in
holographic theatre. Later, Breuer created Peter and Wendy, a musical parable
with puppets and people, seen most recently at the New Victory Theatre in
1997. In Cold Harbor, Bill Raymond and Dale Worsley brought Ulysses S. Grant
back to life as an animated museum exhibition, and Warrilow offered his
haunting renditions of Samuel Beckett’s non-dramatic works. In common with
other companies, Mabou Mines was nomadic, finding its longest residency at
the Public, where the group was certified as Papp’s experimentalists.
In the sixties, Richard Schechner, a critic, academic, and director, founded
the Performance Group, inspired by the work of Antonin Artaud and Jerzy
Grotowski. Dionysus in ’69, a collective piece by Schechner and company, a
self-proclaimed theatre of ecstasy, brought the audience viscerally into the
theatrical event. Schechner took a related approach with Genet’s The Balcony
and Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime, with in each case artistry subordinated to
ritualism. Schechner’s successor at the Performing Garage, Elizabeth
LeCompte’s Wooster Group, specialized in deconstruction, stripping
Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Chekhov from their roots. Actors emerged
from this troupe: Willem Dafoe and Spalding Gray, who began to explore the
storybook from life, recounting in minute and often hilarious detail his misadventures as man, actor, and author. Without altering his manner or his
material, Gray moved from the smallest of stages to the Broadway-scale
Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Only his audience grew.
Through all the changing currents of fashion, André Gregory held fast to
his idiosyncratic principles. Committed to the art of process, this director
would spend long periods in studio work, which might never be seen by the
public. An early piece, his version of Alice in Wonderland (1970), performed
by his Manhattan Project ensemble, ran Off-Broadway, as did his production
of Wallace Shawn’s Our Late Night (1975). After directing internationally and
working as an actor, Gregory reappeared in the nineties with a workshop of
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Uncle Vanya, starring Shawn in the title role. Though the play was seen only
by a limited invited audience, Louis Malle’s 1994 film version of the Gregory
production, Vanya on 42nd Street, brought the work to a wider public.
Ellen Stewart has the longest list of discoveries; at the top is Andrei Serban,
whom she first found at an international theatre festival in Zagreb,
Yugoslavia. She sponsored him and brought him to America in the late sixties,
a period, as Serban observed with accuracy, when the “avant-garde was in
flower” (New York Times, 18 March 1984). It was indeed a flourishing time.
During a single season, one could see the work of the Open Theatre,
Grotowski’s Polish Lab Theatre, and Robert Wilson. In 1974, in collaboration
with Elizabeth Swados as composer, Serban staged Fragments of a Trilogy, a
stunning environmental reinterpretation of Greek tragedy, in which theatregoers were made to feel like witnesses to the fall of Troy. Both Serban and
Swados, following what was becoming a traditional path, moved on to the
New York Shakespeare Festival, where they became exemplars of Papp’s own
interest in experimentation: Swados with the musical Runaways (1978) about
young people living on the streets of New York, and Serban with futher adventures in Greek tragedy.
The longer-running companies achieved and maintained an identity.
Marshall Mason’s partnership with Lanford Wilson at the Circle Rep brought
about a rich body of work, and set the tone for others who followed: Mark
Medoff with When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder (1973), Edward J. Moore with
The Sea Horse (1973), Jules Feiffer with Knock Knock (1976). Within five years,
the Circle Rep had become a principal producer of new American plays. Soon
it had an Off-Broadway home and presented plays there and on Broadway,
including works by Wilson and Albert Innaurato (Gemini), and William
Hoffman’s As Is (1985), one of the first plays to deal dramatically with the AIDS
epidemic. The company was also notable in giving opportunity to actors like
Judd Hirsch, William Hurt, Jeff Daniels, Christopher Reeve, and Demi Moore.
Artistic conflicts and a decrease in financial support eventually led to a disruption in the company, and several changes in management. After Mason,
Berezin took over the artistic direction and specialized in more Absurdist
works by playwrights like Paula Vogel and Craig Lucas. In 1996, the company,
then under the direction of Austin Pendleton, went out of business, but its
legacy remains.
The Manhattan Theatre Club, under the direction of Lynne Meadow and
Barry Grove, also concentrated on new plays, and in a sense became an OffBroadway version of what might have once been done on Broadway. In
common with Broadway’s Theatre Guild, the MTC was created as a playwrights’ theatre appealing to a mainstream audience. Many of the works produced here, including plays by Terrence McNally, Beth Henley (Crimes of
the Heart), and Richard Greenberg, went on to have an extended life on or
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Off-Broadway. With plays stretching from Bad Habits and It’s Only a Play
through Love! Valor! Compassion! and numerous others, McNally became the
MTC’s favorite playwright. Opening its doors, the company also provided a
home for new plays from Ireland and England: works by Brian Friel, Alan
Ayckbourn, and American-born Timberlake Wertenbaker.
In a relatively short period, MTC grew from a small Off-Off Broadway
theatre to become one of New York’s largest producing organizations. In contrast to competitors, MTC mastered the art of fund-raising and audience
development. It remained Off-Broadway at City Center, where it had two
stages, but more and more its eye was on Broadway. “If Ellen Stewart is La
Mama of Off-Off Broadway,” said Christine Baranski, an actress who has
worked frequently at MTC, “Lynne Meadow is La Mère of Midtown” (New York
Times, 16 June 1994). Meadow’s mentor and role model was Papp, and she
expressed her own taste in her selection of material.
Through various managements, especially when André Bishop was the
artistic director, Playwrights Horizons repeatedly revealed its interest in new
American comedies, many with an underlying serious intent. Wendy
Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles (1988) began here
along with many other of her plays. Playwrights Horizons also produced work
by Jonathan Reynolds, Christopher Durang, Jon Robin Baitz, and A. R. Gurney,
among others, as well as experimental musicals by Stephen Sondheim
(Assassins) and William Finn (March of the Falsettos).
In the career of the composer Alan Menken can be seen the arc of the OffBroadway experience as it opened up and began to reach a broader audience.
With his lyricist partner Howard Ashman, Menken wrote small chamber musicals mostly for the WPA Theatre. One show, The Little Shop of Horrors, based
on a throwaway Grade “B” Hollywood movie, became a huge international
success. After Ashman’s death from AIDS, Menken made the transition to the
Hollywood screen and Broadway itself, as the primary creator of Walt Disney
musical epics like Beauty and the Beast. For many years, the WPA was a prolific
provider of new work by Larry Ketron, Kevin Wade, and other playwrights.
The designer, Edward T. Gianfrancesco, carved out a career creating realistically detailed sets for this company, with great resourcefulness using that
company’s intimate space. Representing the other end of the spectrum, John
Arnone perfected his fanciful settings for Off-Off at the Soho Rep and other
theatres, before making the inevitable move to Broadway musicals.
The Ensemble Studio Theatre is a wide-ranging ensemble of theatre artists
who specialize in studio productions. With Curt Dempster as founder and
artistic director, this cooperative nurtures plays from readings to projects
and occasionally to full-scale stagings, some of which take place at other theatres. The Ensemble Studio has become a primary progenitor of new one-act
plays in its annual “Marathon,” freely mixing work by established writers like
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Horton Foote, Frank D. Gilroy, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, and Christopher
Durang, with newcomers testing themselves in the short dramatic form.
From the first, Off- and Off-Off Broadway emphasized ethnic diversity. Black
theatre artists worked everywhere from the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem
to Woodie King, Jr.’s New Federal Theatre on Grand Street. For many years,
the Negro Ensemble Company, established in 1967, was a centerpiece of OffBroadway. Under the leadership of Douglas Turner Ward, the NEC discovered
plays by Lonne Elder III (Ceremonies in Dark Old Men), Joseph A. Walker (a
1974 Tony winner when his play The River Niger moved to Broadway), SammArt Williams (Home), Charles Fuller (the 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning A
Soldier’s Play), Leslie Lee, and Gus Edwards. Through the NEC, actors made
their initial reputation: Frances Foster, Roxie Roker, Michele Shay, Charles
Brown, and Ward himself. At other theatres, Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka, Richard
Wesley, Charles Gordone, Ntozake Shange, and Ron Milner were having their
plays produced. Among prominent black writers, August Wilson was a single
exception in starting in regional theatre rather than Off- or Off-Off Broadway.
In 1977 Tisa Chang founded the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre at La MaMa,
then went off on her own and became the chief New York producer of works
by Asian American writers, and at the same time she encouraged Asian
American actors and directors. A breakthrough came in 1982 with the Pan
Asian production of Yellow Fever, a private eye spoof by R. A. Shiomi. René
Buch’s Repertorio Español, Miriam Colón’s Puerto Rico Traveling Theatre,
and the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe were among the outstanding Hispanic companies, appealing to a bilingual audience. Irish and Jewish companies asserted
their identities, along with gay and lesbian theatres, all of whom entered the
mainstream with individual works. The Ubu Repertory Theater filled a
vacuum by specializing in contemporary French and other European plays.
Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway proved to be extremely hospitable to
playwrights from abroad, especially those who would have difficulty in a commercial situation. Waiting for Godot was a failure on Broadway, but Samuel
Beckett became one of the most produced playwrights away from the mainstream. Eventually a theatre on Theatre Row, on far West Forty-second Street,
was named for him, as was one for Group Theatre founder Harold Clurman.
Puppetry, New Vaudevillians, and Solo Performance
Puppetry was among the many forms to make an unsual impact Off-Off
Broadway. Paul Zaloom, that irreverent, back-talking critic of cultural and societal Neanderthalism, animated objects in his tabletop theatre. During his brief
stops in New York, Bruce D. Schwartz wore a puppet theatre around his body
like a hugh greatcoat. Theodora Skipitares told instructional stories about
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history, science, and food, and Peter Schumann’s Vermont-based Bread and
Puppet Theatre frequently visited with its totemic figures in political parables.
Julie Taymor began as a puppeteer, in collaboration with Andrei Serban and
Elizabeth Swados, but soon moved out on her own as an inventive theatre
conceptualist. She continued to use mask and puppetry as an organic adjunct
to her brilliantly imaginative tales like Juan Darién. Originally presented in a
small-scale but widely imaginative Off-Off production, Juan Darién reopened
in 1996 on a large stage at Lincoln Center. In this and other Taymor pieces,
Elliot Goldenthal provided the throbbing musical score. Later, she began
exploring Shakespeare (at Theatre for a New Audience) and Carlo Goldoni,
among others, and eventually accepted the role of artistic creator for Disney’s
stage version of The Lion King.
At the same time, Stuart Sherman, a solo and very interiorized artist, entertained audiences with postcards and journal jottings from his itinerant life.
John Jesurun turned tables on theatregoers. In Deep Sleep, Black Maria,
Everything That Rises Must Converge, and other works, Jesurun synthesized
film and television with live action so that actors sometimes found themselves
talking back to themselves on screen. Led by Jesurun, as author, director, and
designer, the audience was hurtled into a seemingly chaotic universe; part of
the fun in watching one of his unsettling plays was to locate the equilibrium.
Although outwardly it might have seemed that the avant-garde had crested
by the eighties, the fact is that like Off-Off Broadway itself it had spread out
and fragmented. If anything it had become more experimental and was making
freer use of new technology, through the efforts of people like Robert Wilson,
Breuer, Chong, and Chris Hardman, who came from California with his walkthrough environmental theatre. The experimental had long since left behind
psychodrama and was more concerned with questions of art and art in
society. The American avant-garde was responding to Peter Brook’s statement
that “in the theatre the slate is wiped clean all the time” (quoted in the New
York Times, 18 March 1984).
In the eighties, New Vaudeville was born, springing up in circuses and
Renaissance fairs: a converging of old vaudeville comedy with performance
art moves. At the height was Bill Irwin, America’s genius clown, who polished
his art at the Ringling Brothers Clown College and then leaped into the avantgarde. With The Regard of Flight, which began at the Dance Theatre Workshop,
and then captured a wider appreciative audience, he explored the clown’s
nightmare, waking up in a bed onstage, and not knowing why he was there.
Out of the clown car tumbled Bob Berky, Fred Garbo, the juggler Michael
Moschen (a maestro in motion), Geoff Hoyle, the self-satirizing magicians
Penn and Teller, and the Flying Karamazov Brothers, who broke through to a
Broadway audience with their juggling (of words as well as objects). Dance
Theatre Workshop was the home of many New Vaudeville artists, and also
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other performance specialists like Whoopi Goldberg, who made her solo New
York debut there.
The Music-Theatre Group, founded in 1971 by Lyn Austin, became one of
the primary producers of innovative musical theatre projects, both at its
home in Lenox, Massachusetts, and in various Off-Broadway locations.
Among the many artists encouraged by Austin were Richard Foreman, Anne
Bogart, and Martha Clarke. Along with Akalaitis and others, Clarke drew from
an interest in literary sources and the visual arts. She herself began as a
member of the Pilobolus Dance Theatre; dance remained an important
element in her theatrical pieces. The Garden of Earthly Delights (1984), a freefloating epic inspired by Hieronymous Bosch, with actors performing airs
above ground, set the tone for her magical creations, which merged dance,
theatre, music, and visual imagery. Garden was followed by Vienna Lusthaus
(1986), The Hunger Artist, and Endangered Species (1990).
Wynn Handman’s American Place Theatre was an early producer of new
American plays, focusing on such literary works as Robert Lowell’s The Old
Glory (1964) and plays by Ronald Ribman (Harry, Noon and Night [1965] and
The Journey of the Fifth Horse [1966], both of which starred a newcomer,
Dustin Hoffman). Much later, the American Place gave center stage to Eric
Bogosian, a sharp-witted monologist (and playwright). For years the
American Place collaborated with Julia Miles’s Women’s Project in presenting
new work by female playwrights, whose number included Lavonne Mueller,
Marlane Meyers, Kathleen Tolan, and Heather McDonald. Then the Women’s
Project split off and continued working on its own. The Interart Theatre and
New Georges were among other groups committed to expanding opportunities for women in the theatre. As an encourager of new writers, the playwright and director Maria Irene Fornés also played a pivotal role.
In the late sixties Carolee Schneemann used her naked body in performance and told graphic stories while talking about her art work.
Counterculture monologists appeared with greater frequency in the late eighties. Of all those who spoke candidly about their life on the line, the most
notable was Karen Finley, who achieved celebrity and notoriety when she and
Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck were denied grants by the National
Endowment for the Arts because of the controversial nature of their material.
Although she also wrote plays (and worked as a visual artist) it was in her solo
performances (e.g., We Keep Our Victims Ready, 1989) that she made the most
indelible impression. Using her own body (often unclothed) in her act, she
became the medium of her message, blazing new paths in demanding freedom
of expression and a liberation of individualism. The censorious attacks misperceived Finley: she was an artist as moralist.
Before this collision with performance art, the National Endowment
played a significant but ambiguous role in the development of Off-Broadway
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and Off-Off Broadway. Through the leadership of Nancy Hanks, the
Endowment lent support to worthy individuals and organizations, as did the
New York State Council on the Arts (under the direction of Kitty Carlisle Hart).
But after attacks by members of Congress, and despite the leadership of
Congressman Sidney Yates and others, the NEA became increasingly vulnerable and timid. Private foundations took up some of the slack, but, in time,
many of them also decreased their activity. Both the Ford Foundation and the
Rockefeller Foundation played pivotal roles in earlier years but changed their
direction, leaving many artists in limbo, although individual grants continued
to come from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and other organizations.
Significantly, the MacArthur “genius” awards in theatre have primarily gone
to individuals from Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway: Bill Irwin, Martha
Clarke, Bruce D. Schwartz, Michael Moschen, Julie Taymor, Ellen Stewart,
Richard Foreman, Elizabeth LeCompte, and John Jesurun.
Through the decades, theatre has broken away from traditional surroundings, moving into the streets and other public places. The Happenings of the
fifties gave way to the Living Theatre’s theatricalized demonstrations in the
sixties, and so on. In the eighties Anne Hamburger had the idea of expanding
this idea into a company, En Garde Arts, that was devoted to presenting sitespecific plays – in other words, plays put on in a specific setting that complements the work itself.
En Garde went from the West Side waterfront to the meat-packing district,
from a Harlem street to the facade of a high-rise building in lower Manhattan
for a sound, light, and action show. On location, the troupe invented a kind of
architectural theatre, as exemplified by the work of Mac Wellman. He wrote
plays for En Garde Arts that took place on a lake in Central Park (Bad Penny)
and in an abandoned former theatre on West Forty-second Street (Crowbar).
Eventually, in 1996, En Garde returned to Forty-second Street, then in the
process of being revitalized and Disneyfied, and offered in late 1996 the United
States premiere of Deborah Warner’s version of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,”
a one-woman show for the Irish actress Fiona Shaw.
Wellman himself became a pivotal dramatist of the eighties and nineties,
shattering tradition and confronting conservatism (and censorious United
States senators) in such provocative plays as Terminal Hip, Sincerity Forever,
and A Murder of Crows. His plays were produced Off-Off Broadway (at Primary
Stages and the Soho Rep) and in regional theatres, but not at major institutional theatres. Politicians as well as the public at large held Wellman at arm’s
length. Through stubbornness if not by choice, he remained underground. In
common with one of the characters in The Hyacinth Macaw (1994), Wellman
has “an inescapable penchant for acts that defy convention,” and also has a
suspicion about the need for naturalism. Surrealism is closer to his mode. At
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the same time, he performs linguistic acrobatics, bringing a new sense of language into the theatre, combining lexiconic esoterica with street speech.
In this area, he is in company with Eric Overmyer, Len Jenkin, Suzan-Lori
Parks, and others. In plays like On the Verge, Native Speech, and comic stage
noir, like Dark Rapture, Overmyer excavates a new American language while
taking his audience on fantastical voyages. At the same time, David Ives was
writing comic cameos about couples and cultural icons. His one-acts
appeared in a variety of places during the nineties and were finally collected
as All in the Timing, which opened 1 December 1993, a breakthrough work for
the author, and one that was to encourage other writers of short plays.
Changes: Seventies Through the Nineties
Off-Broadway spread throughout the boroughs, concentrating, of course, in
Manhattan but also becoming a welcome outpost in Brooklyn, with the
Brooklyn Academy of Music. By the eighties Harvey Lichtenstein had turned
this multi-theatre complex into a home for opera, dance, and drama, inviting
major foreign artists like Peter Brook, Ingmar Bergman, Ariane Mnouchkine,
Giorgio Strehler, and Robert Lepage, but also presenting work by homegrown
talent, including John Kelly, Martha Clarke, Fred Curchack, and Ping Chong.
BAM’s work continued through the Next Wave Festival (begun in 1983), an
annual gathering of experimental artists in various performance disciplines.
For a time in the late sixties and the seventies, BAM also offered a home to
the Chelsea Theatre Center. Founded in 1965 by Robert Kalfin and Michael
David, the Chelsea made a policy of staging difficult, seldom performed classics, such as plays by Heinrich von Kleist, Jean Genet, and others. Chelsea
eventually ended its run, as did the shortlived BAM Theatre Company, an
aspiring attempt to create an acting company within the confines of the
Brooklyn Academy. These are among the many theatres that made substantial contributions and then curtailed their operations: others include the
Hudson Guild (which presented Hugh Leonard’s Da with Barnard Hughes and
Brian Murray), BACA Downtown in Brooklyn, Theatre at St. Clements, and the
Manhattan Punch Line. Generally, theatres closed because of financial problems; occasionally it was for artistic reasons, or, simply, that the people in
charge felt that the theatre had run its course. For decades, the Equity Library
Theatre introduced new actors in worthy revivals, and then fell victim to the
economics of play production. As with other areas of the theatre, some of the
most impressive talent died of AIDS.
New theatres continued to spring up annually: Naked Angels, Cucaracha,
Dixon Place, the New Group, the Drama Department. One with a specific,
admirable goal, the Signature Theatre Company, was to make an important
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impact in the nineties. Founded in 1991 by James Houghton, the Signature had
the original idea of devoting an entire season to the work of a single playwright, beginning with Romulus Linney. A revival of Linney’s The Sorrows of
Frederick was followed by the premiere of his Ambrosio and other works,
giving theatregoers a portrait of the diversity of this underappreciated writer.
Linney is in his own way a quintessential Off-Broadway playwright. His plays
have also been done in regional theatre and, once, on Broadway, but with a
certain regularity they appear in small theatres in New York, including
Theater for the New City, each adding to what has become a substantial and
rewarding body of work. In common with Lanford Wilson and Sam Shepard,
Linney writes about America’s heartland.
In subsequent seasons at Signature, Lee Blessing, Edward Albee, Horton
Foote, Adrienne Kennedy, and Sam Shepard were all represented, with
Signature productions re-establishing the reputations of writers and putting
the Signature itself on the theatrical map. Albee won a Pulitzer Prize during
his season in residence (1993–94), and Foote won one for a play, The Young
Man from Atlanta, presented at Signature in 1995. As is typical of the terrain,
the company was nomadic, forced to move its location, at one point finding a
residency at the Public Theater (a more permanent venue was located in
1998). In Papp’s time, that theatre often sheltered visiting troupes.
In its specialization, the Second Stage, founded in 1979, took an admirable,
self-limiting approach. The basic premise was that the company would revive
plays from the recent past, plays that had been overlooked such as Lanford
Wilson’s Serenading Louie and John Guare’s Landscape of the Body. But soon
the company shifted most of its energies to doing new plays by writers such
as Michael Weller, Tina Howe, and Eric Overmyer.
The Theater for the New City is a bastion of theatrical enterprise. Founded
in 1971 by Crystal Field, George Bartenieff, and others, it became one of the
longest surviving, most prolific companies, in the summers taking its plays
out on city streets. Theater for the New City is very much a people’s theatre,
and theatregoers, clearly oblivious to the press, come out and see their favorites. While TNC continued through lean years, the New York Theatre
Workshop quickly became one of the more firmly established of the new theatres, presenting venturesome work by Tony Kushner, Ain Gordon, and Doug
Wright. The company’s breakthrough show was the 1996 musical Rent,
Jonathan Larson’s transposition of La Bohème to New York’s Lower East Side.
After the death of the author-composer, Rent moved to Broadway, gathered
the 1996 Pulitzer and other prizes and went on to phenomenal success. More
than any other show, this musical demonstrates the outreach of Off-Off
Broadway.
Often there has been a connection between theatre and education or professional training. The Juilliard Drama Center gave birth to the Acting
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Company, a national touring company that discovered Kevin Kline, Patti
LuPone, and others, and made regular stops Off-Broadway. New York
University’s Tisch School of the Arts opened doors to the public and to
theatre artists like Anne Bogart, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson (with
his seismic production of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine). Off-Broadway
companies, like Playwrights Horizons and the Circle Rep, had their own
linkage with academia, enlisting artistic associates to teach in collaborative
theatre schools. Through his annual Portfolio Review at Lincoln Center, Ming
Cho Lee, the dean of scenic designers (and on the faculty of the Yale School
of Drama), has encouraged the work of young scenic, costume, and lighting
designers, many of whom have begun their careers Off-Broadway.
The International Theatre Institute is a largely unobserved but essential
element in the experimental theatre. Headed first by Rosamond Gilder and for
many years by Martha Coigney, ITI is a worldwide service organization and
clearing-house for foreign artists working in the United States and for
American artists wishing to tour abroad. Similarly, the Theatre
Communications Group, headquartered in New York, provides an information
and networking service among theatres in this country.
When titles were passed around, Lucille Lortel was dubbed the queen of
Off-Broadway, a most appropriate appellation for this tireless producer and
theatre owner. As other theatres ended their own runs, her Theatre de Lys (on
Christopher Street in Greenwich Village), named the Lucille Lortel in 1981,
was consistently one of Off-Broadway’s most desirable locations. It continues
to add cachet to the productions it houses, which have included the longrunning The Threepenny Opera, David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, Caryl
Churchill’s Cloud Nine, and Larry Kramer’s The Destiny of Me, and through the
fifties and sixties a series of ANTA (American National Theatre and Academy)
Matinees of new plays. Her generosity gave playwrights a monetary reward
when they won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle prize at the end of the
season, an award that increasingly went to Off-Broadway plays. Today, the
Lucille Lortel Award honors Off-Broadway artists.
Brooks Atkinson’s New York Times review of Geraldine Page in Summer and
Smoke at Circle in the Square put that theatre and the actress in the spotlight.
But despite his occasional visits to the Circle and Papp’s Shakespeare in
Central Park and reviews by others of Off-Broadway, the Times did not begin
covering Off-Off Broadway in depth until Mel Gussow joined the newspaper
as a theatre critic. There was pioneering work by Harold Clurman in The
Nation and Henry Hewes in Saturday Review, but in other respects New York
critics were slow to recognize the breadth of the work being done OffBroadway and Off-Off Broadway.
In its early days, The Village Voice was both influential and relatively broadminded. Jerry Tallmer, Michael Smith, and others wrote about a wide range of
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activity and, through the Obie Awards (created by Tallmer in 1956), the Voice
honored artists of importance excluded from Broadway’s Tony Awards.
Beckett’s Endgame, for example, was given an Obie as Best Play the same year
(1958) that Dore Schary’s Sunrise at Campobello was voted a Tony Award.
Julius Novick, Alisa Solomon, Michael Feingold, and others continued this tradition, although in recent years the coverage of the Village Voice and the Obies
themselves have become increasingly insular. For more comprehensive
coverage, theatregoers could turn to Edith Oliver, who for many years made
her columns in The New Yorker an outpost of sensible Off-Broadway criticism;
Bonnie Marranca at Performing Arts Journal; and to American Theatre
Magazine (published by Theatre Communications Group).
Perhaps more than anything, theatre away from Broadway is marked by its
fluidity – and the further away from Broadway the more fluid it becomes. Even
as individuals like Ellen Stewart and Richard Foreman are icons of survival,
the work itself moved with the times, meeting new needs, confronting new and
continuing issues and giving a stage or a performance space to emerging
talents.
Notes
1 Editors’ note: Mel Gussow has had an abiding interest in the areas covered by this
chapter since the fifties, and in his capacity as a critic for the New York Times
(1969–93) he covered many of the events described in this essay. He has also interviewed most of the individuals quoted herein; consequently, unless otherwise indicated, quotes are derived from personal interviews, with specific original sources of
quotes, when previously published, noted in the text.
2 For an expanded discussion of these and other alternative theatre artists, see
Marvin Carlson’s section of this chapter.
3 Guggenheims are only awarded to individuals, yet Ludlam chooses to use the Royal
– or rather the Ridiculous – “we” here.
Bibliography: Off- and Off-Off Broadway
There is no complete, authoritative study of Off-Broadway or Off-Off Broadway, but
there are books that summarize aspects of each and there are critical works that are
helpful in understanding the range of artistic endeavor. Some of the more useful
sources are out of print or at least partly out of date.
The Off-Off Broadway Book by Poland and Mailman is basically a collection of early
plays by writers such as Ribman, Van Itallie, Guare, Tavel, Horovitz, and Kennedy. As
a prelude, there are summaries of the pivotal Off-Off Broadway companies and a valuable listing of all the plays produced by those companies before the publication of the
book.
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Off- and Off-Off Broadway
Off-Broadway by Little focuses on major companies and personalities (Theodore
Mann and José Quintero at Circle in the Square, Joseph Papp, the Living Theatre; there
is a chapter on Off-Broadway award winners from 1955 to 1971). A more recent book
on Papp is Epstein’s 1994 biography. Foster Hirsch is working on a study of Papp and
the New York Shakespeare Festival. The Living Theatre has recently been studied in
Tytell’s The Living Theatre. And the Chelsea Theatre Center has received good coverage by Davi Napoleon, while the first fifteen years of Circle Rep have been chronicled
by Mary Ryzuk.
The Obie Winners, edited with an introduction by Ross Wetzsteon, brings together
many of the best plays, including Jack Gelber’s The Connection, Samuel Beckett’s
Krapp’s Last Tape, and David Mamet’s American Buffalo. It begins with an introduction
by Ross Wetzsteon, a longtime observer of the Off-Broadway scene. The Best of Off-Off
Broadway is an anthology of seven early plays by Shepard, Tavel, and others. In the
introduction, Michael Smith says that Off-Off Broadway was created “for and partly by
new playwrights, who have in turn proliferated beyond all expectation.”
In The New American Theatre (an issue of Conjunctions, published by Bard College
in 1995 and guest edited by John Guare), there is a sampling of short plays and
excerpts from plays by Keith Reddin, Erik Ehn, Doug Wright, and others. The introduction is by Joyce Carol Oates, who is represented by a surrealistic comedy about adoption. Wellman’s plays are collected in The Bad Infinity, Overmyer’s in Eric Overmyer:
Collected Plays, and Breuer’s work is in Sister Suzie Cinema: The Collected Poems and
Performances, 1976–1986.
Among critical works, The Collected Works of Harold Clurman (edited by Loggia and
Young) brings together in one hefty, 1,101-page volume the reviews of the most knowledgeable and articulate of American theatre critics, as written over a period of six
decades. Many of the reviews are of productions Off-Broadway. Marranca, who with
Gautam Dasgupta edits Performing Arts Journal, has several books of note, including
Theatrewritings, a collection of her reviews and essays about Lee Breuer, Sam Shepard,
and Richard Foreman, among others; and The Theatre of Images (republished with a
new afterword in 1996) includes plays by Foreman, Breuer, and Robert Wilson, with
commentary by the editor. Gussow’s Theatre on the Edge is a collection of reviews and
essays (1970 to early 1990s) principally of plays Off- and Off-Off Broadway.
American Playwrights Since 1945, edited by Kolin, analyzes the careers of forty playwrights, most of whom began Off-Broadway, and puts each in a biographical, critical,
and bibliographical context. Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd deals with the experimental theatre on an international level and is useful in tracing influences and sources,
as is Adler’s American Drama 1940–1960 and Roudané’s American Drama Since 1960,
though these are focused on American examples.
Charles Ludlam was one of the most provocative theorizers of the experimental
theatre. His essays and critical notations are collected in Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge
of Human Folly. As edited by Samuels, the book provides a keen insight into the thinking of this multitalented artist. The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam contains twentynine plays, preceded by a brief biographical essay by Samuels.
Six plays of Foreman are collected under the title My Head Was a Sledgehammer and
five others are in Unbalancing Acts, an anthology of plays and essays about his theories, philosophy, and methods. An early work, Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos,
edited by Davy, offers a developmental look at Foreman through such plays as Pain(t)
and Rhoda in Potatoland.
Two matching volumes (both published by Theatre Communications Group) let the
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artists speak for themselves. In In Their Own Words, David Savran interviews twenty
playwrights, from Lee Breuer to Lanford Wilson (a sequel to this collection is scheduled for publication in 1999), and in The Director’s Voice, Arthur Bartow talks to twentyone directors, from JoAnne Akalaitis to Garland Wright. Speaking on Stage, edited by
Kolin and Kullman, is a collection of twenty-seven interviews with playwrights, ranging
from Edward Albee and Jack Gelber to Romulus Linney and Ntozake Shange.
Regional/Resident Theatre
Martha LoMonaco
Definition
In 1951, a theatrical entrepreneur from Dallas, Texas, published a book which
would become a manifesto and a source of inspiration for the regional theatre
movement. At this early date, however, there was not yet a movement afoot;
it was more a nationwide smattering of talented, ambitious, theatre people
who were looking for a place to do their work and a community to support it.
Margo Jones, her Theatre ’47, and her 1951 book, Theatre-in-the-Round,
inspired a generation of would-be artistic directors. “Every town in America
wants theatre!” she wrote. “It is the duty and business of a capable theatre
person to go into the communities of this country and create fine theatres”
(6). Go out they did, and what had been a handful of theatres in the 1950s grew
to sixteen by 1961 and over 300 by 1996. Regional theatre in America was born.
The term “regional” is hotly debated and ultimately eschewed by most
theatres, which prefer to be known as resident, repertory, or more comprehensively, resident non-profit professional theatres. Robert Brustein outlines
his preference for the word “resident” to “regional” in a 22 May 1988 New York
Times article in which he states that the resident theatre movement “was originally intended as an alternative to Broadway, not as a provincial tributary.”
The notion of repertory was also at the heart of the movement, he declares,
where the ideal was to develop “a large number of works over the course of a
season, preferably in rotation so that in a single week audiences could enjoy
a variety of offerings and actors could play a variety of parts.” Although a few
resident companies have attempted to play in full or partial repertory, it is and
has been rare.
All these descriptives have their limitations; ultimately none, alone or even
in combinations, provide an adequate umbrella term. Resident non-profit professional is probably the most descriptive, but it encompasses theatres in all
U.S. regions including the diverse regions of New York City. There are over
thirty such theatres in the borough of Manhattan, including Lincoln Center
(uptown), Manhattan Theatre Club (midtown), New York Shakespeare
Festival (downtown), and Roundabout Theatre Company, which is resident as
of this writing in the heart of the traditional Broadway theatre district. Hence,
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to describe all those resident non-profit professional theatres outside of New
York City, I shall revert, with no disparagement, to the word “regional.”
Decentralization
The notions of residency and professionalism were at the heart of Margo
Jones’s philosophy and thus distinguish the regional houses from amateur
ventures. “I say these theatres must be resident,” she declared in
Theatre-in-the-Round, “because they should give the community as well as the
staff an assurance of continuity, and they must be professional because, if we
insist on the highest standards of production, the actors and staff must spend
eight hours a day in the theatre” (6). Jones’s directive to establish “resident
professional theatre in every city with a population of over one hundred thousand” (4), was an automatic argument for decentralization, another tenet of
regional theatre. Brustein combines the basic ingredients – resident, decentralized, and professional as well as the need for subsidy – in his New York
Times portrait of the movement:
This movement wished to decentralize American theater in the belief that it
was unhealthy to originate so much stage activity in one cultural capital
(New York). It sought partial subsidy in an effort to free the theater from
undue dependence on the timidity of the box office. And it wished to consolidate itself out of a conviction that permanent ensembles of actors, directors, designers and administrative staff, preserving the classical repertory
and developing new plays, created a potentially more enduring theatrical art
than pickup casts assembled for a single show and dominated by star personalities.
The desire for resident, decentralized, professional theatres also motivated
the movement toward an American national theatre which was a significant
forerunner of both Jones and the regional movement she helped to instigate.
Robert Porterfield and Robert Breen were the first to formalize these yearnings in an October 1945 article in Theatre Arts magazine, “Toward a National
Theatre.” Buoyed by the recent success of Britain’s first arts subsidy, CEMA
(Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), as well as longestablished precedents in other nations, these men called for America to
catch up. “We have more and better bathtubs, bridges, buildings and machinery than any other country in the world,” they argued, “it is time for us to
match this leadership in cultural fields as well.”
Porterfield and Breen recognized the impracticality of having a single
“‘shrine’ or building, or even ten” representing a national theatre since the
United States is simply too large. Hence, they advocated decentralizing the
professional theatre as “the only way we can have a truly national theatre:
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touring companies, resident companies, civic centre theatres, regional theatres, making available high standard, professional theatre to the 90 percent of
our people who have never had the opportunity of seeing it” and presented a
plan for a U.S. Public Theater Foundation to subsidize their dream (599–602).
Four years later, Theatre Arts (April 1949) published a second national theatre
proposal bearing the same title but this time presented by two Congressmen,
Senator Irving Ives and Representative Jacob K. Javits, who had formalized
these desires into a Congressional bill. Their recommendation extended the
Porterfield/Breen plan to include a national opera and ballet but they, too,
were not concerned with buildings. Their objective was “to make theatre,
opera and ballet available to the people everywhere in the United States”
simply because “these arts are indispensable to our democratic culture and,
consequently, a matter of national concern” (10–13). Neither proposal got off
the ground but both established the need for the regional theatres to come
and reflected the haphazard state of the national theatre scene prior to 1945.
Whatever terminology is employed, it is a fact that these professional, resident, non-profit, regional theatres (and also those non-commercial venues in
New York City) became a national force during the second half of the twentieth century. According to statistics compiled by Theatre Communications
Group (TCG), the national organization and principal advocate for America’s
non-profit professional theatre, these theatres number over 300 and are resident in forty of the fifty states with the highest concentration in New York
State, California, and Pennsylvania, with Illinois, Georgia, Massachusetts, and
Washington close behind.1 Collectively, TCG refers to the theatre companies
and individual artists as “our national theatre.”
Precursors
The principal precursors of the regional theatre movement are contained in
Volume 2 of this history, covering the years 1870–1945: “the Road,” the Little
Theatre movement, summer theatres, the Group Theatre, the Federal Theatre
Project, and ANTA. To properly set the stage for the coming regionals,
however, a brief review of each follows. Certainly there was a great deal of
theatre activity throughout the country prior to 1945 but quantity did not
guarantee quality, nor did it satisfy artists or audiences. The two most widespread types were, in fact, at opposite ends of the theatrical spectrum. “The
Road,” as it is commonly known, was the proliferation of touring companies
that crisscrossed the nation beginning in the mid-nineteenth century with the
development of the transcontinental railroad. These were strictly commercial
operations launched mostly by New York based syndicates whose primary
interest was in delivering product – not art – fast and furiously. The second
group, known as the Little Theatre movement, evolved nationwide during the
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first two decades of the century, largely in response to the frequently poor
quality of commercial theatre and the excitement generated by the new
European art theatres. The Little Theatres, the forerunners of today’s community theatres, were founded by groups of serious-minded and ambitious amateurs who considered theatre an ennobling form of self-expression. Although
some did very fine work (a few, notably the Cleveland Play House, evolved
into professional regional theatres), their work collectively was uneven at
best.
Summer theatre, frequently in the form of resident stock companies,
sprang up in the blossoming resort areas of the nation, but particularly in the
northeastern sector during the twenties and thirties. Unlike the Little
Theatres, most were operated by trained artists who saw an opportunity to
provide entertainment to vacationers in remote locales. They launched ambitious seasons with weekly changes of bill, mostly of Broadway hits but also
some classics and new works being tried for potential Broadway transfers.
Several of these, like Virginia’s Barter Theatre, also evolved into fully fledged
regional theatres with three-quarter or year-round seasons; many others are
still active as summer venues. Their limited season and resort milieu naturally
attracted a narrow, generally privileged, clientele.
These legitimate theatrical offerings, as well as the proliferation of popular
entertainments such as vaudeville, burlesque, and the new mediated entertainments of film and radio, inspired groups of serious theatre people as well
as the U.S. government to offer high-quality alternatives. The Theatre Guild,
founded in 1919, mounted important, well-produced plays on Broadway and
later on tour, thus exposing large numbers of people nationwide to many of
the best new European and American dramas. The now legendary Group
Theatre, founded in 1931 and active for the next decade, was a theatre collective that emphasized actor training and the development of socially
significant American plays. In 1935 the U.S. Congress chartered the American
National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) as a non-profit people’s theatre
designed to disseminate quality drama nationwide. Unfortunately, ANTA was
largely inactive until after World War II and then its activities tended to be New
York centered. Finally, the ambitious Federal Theatre Project was launched as
part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration in 1935. Under Hallie
Flanagan’s leadership, it produced innovative and diversified theatre nationwide until dissolved by Congress in 1939. Although hailed by many as the first
true national theatre, it really was a temporary relief organization that provided jobs for unemployed theatre artists and administrators.
Amidst this wide array of entertainments and the ever present reign of
Broadway as the American theatre, there were a few pioneers establishing
independent, self-producing theatres outside of New York. The Cleveland Play
House, which began as a Little Theatre in 1916, turned professional in 1921
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with the hiring of Frederic McConnell as artistic director. By 1927 it had outgrown its old venue and had built a new theatre with two performance spaces
that offered a distinguished season of European and American plays by a resident company of twenty-five actors. In 1923, eight years before the Group
formed what was thought to be the first theatre collective in the United States,
Jasper Deeter did the same in the rural community of Moylan-Rose Valley,
Pennsylvania, fourteen miles southwest of Philadelphia. Deeter’s Hedgerow
Theatre began with nine dollars, an old mill which became the playhouse, and
a company of players who were dissatisfied with the commercialism of
Broadway. They lived communally at the theatre, functioned as a financial
cooperative, and became one of the few U.S. theatres to run in full repertory
(a policy that continued until 1958) year-round. According to an article in the
Philadelphia Evening Ledger, in 1934 Hedgerow presented thirty-four plays
from its repertoire of 108 for a total of 318 performances operating fifty-one
weeks of the year.2 A similar escape from New York commercialism impelled
the founding, in 1933, of the Barter Theatre by Robert Porterfield. Porterfield
persuaded a troupe of twenty-two New York actors to come to the remote
town of Abingdon in southwestern Virginia with the idea of bringing together
hungry actors and farmers with a surplus of produce. He advertised his
admission price as “30 cents or the equivalent in rations. Bring us honey, fresh
eggs, fresh vegetables, hams and other edibles.” Renowned for its fine ensemble acting, the company grew from a summer to year-round operation under
Porterfield’s inspired leadership.
These and other pioneering theatres (including the Pittsburgh Playhouse,
Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, the Pasadena Playhouse, and San Diego’s Old
Globe Theatre) were the beginnings of regional theatre in America.
Significantly, all were founded and/or operated via the driving force of one
person. Whether called the artistic, managing, producing, or executive director, it was this single individual’s energy, artistry, ambition, demands, and
vision that gave birth to the theatre and propelled it forward. The director’s
charisma and sheer force of character attracted fellow artists as well as the
local community, which was persuaded to donate time, money, or both to the
enterprise. Zelda Fichandler, a founder and the ultimate force behind
Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage, describes their shared history:
In the old days, the theatre was its artistic director. It was the artistic director, propelled by a vision of burning (and blinding; it was not the time of farsighted five-year plans!) intensity, who brought the theatre into being,
assembled the meager economic and physical resources (in our case the
theatre was a $1.99 cardboard file-box for many months), persuaded into
existence a small board, and collected or already had available a group of
artists ready to set out on a journey of undetermined length to a vaguely
determined destination.3
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Since the artistic director was the founder, manager, and self-appointed
visionary, there was rarely, in these early days, a contract or other formalized
arrangement. As Fichandler contends, the only contract the artistic director
had “was one with him/herself and that was unwritten and, therefore, binding,
more-or-less until death do us part.”4 In the minds of the community, the
theatre was inseparable from the director – their personalities and identities
became one. This cult of personality put many of these theatres on the cultural and geographical map and was a source of pride and power to the community that supported it. Difficulties inevitably arose, however, when the
director left or died and the theatre had to find an acceptable successor.
Fichandler, who spearheaded the Arena for forty years before retiring in 1990,
wisely groomed a successor to ensure a smooth transition, yet Douglas Wager
subsequently left in 1998 – a sign of the fragile state of non-profit theatres in
the late nineties. Fichandler undoubtedly learned from the travails of fellow
institutions, many of which struggled for years to redefine their theatres or
even folded when boards and artists simply could find no mutually agreeable
solution. It is undeniable, however, that these personalities created and nurtured regional theatre in America. The one with the most wide-reaching influence, “the mother of us all,” according to Fichandler, was Margo Jones.
Pioneers
Margo Jones
Margo Jones is a prime example of the artistic director with boundless energy,
an infectious, messianic personality, and a solid artistic background. She traveled and studied throughout the world and directed in college, community,
and professional theatres throughout the United States, including Broadway,
thus affording her a broad, sophisticated education upon which to build her
new theatre. The Rockefeller Foundation recognized her talent and awarded
her a grant to pursue her dream of a permanent, professional, repertory,
native theatre in Dallas, Texas, concurrently devoted to showcasing the classics and the best new scripts available. On 3 June 1947, she opened Theatre
’47 (the name would change annually on New Year’s Eve “in order to remain
contemporary at all times”) with the first professional production of a play by
William Inge, Farther Off From Heaven (later revised as The Dark at the Top of
the Stairs). According to Jones’s statistics in Theatre-in-the-Round, during its
first four seasons Theatres ’47–’50 produced eighteen new scripts and eleven
classics in repertory fashion on an arena stage. Not only had she proved that
she could succeed at such an ambitious project, but she also popularized a
new staging configuration to the professional American theatre. Her book, no
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4. Floor and Light plan of Theatre ’50 (Margo Jones Theatre) with sketch of the interior
theatre-in-the-round. Don B. Wilmeth Collection.
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doubt read by every budding artistic director, provided not only a handbook
but a manifesto, compelling the reader to get out and do likewise.
Theatre-in-the-Round was published in 1951 just as Jones was about to
launch Theatre ’51 for its fifth season. The wide-eyed romanticism of her
prose (“Let us stir up the practical realization of a potential, of a dream, of an
ideal!”) is tempered by the practicality of her method and the documented
results. She cites four “absolutely inflexible basic policies”:
1. Complete professionalism.
2. Production of only new plays and classics, with an emphasis on the new
play.
3. A permanent resident company for the entire season.
4. A minimum of three weeks of rehearsal time for every play. (191)
In order to meet such an ambitious program, Jones offers her economical plan
for theatres-in-the-round. She proposes that any space large enough to accommodate both an audience and a playing area can be converted to an arena
theatre and provides forty-one pages of “how-to” advice, ranging from structural details, number and placement of lighting instruments, challenges of
staging for actors and directors, and perspectives on accommodating a
proscenium-trained audience. Throughout, she insists on a completely professional and innovative approach (“we will never rejuvenate the theatre by
doing the old things in the same old ways”) and warns that just because
theatre-in-the-round costs less money, it cannot be artistically less distinguished. Furthermore, she reiterates, this can and should be done in every
town in America. “My dream for the future,” she proposes, “is a theatre which
is a part of everybody’s life, just as the railroad and the airplane are, a theatre
in every town providing entertainment and enlightenment for the audience
and a decent livelihood along with high artistic ideals for the theatre worker”
(201). Many heard her call, and eagerly took up the mantle.
Nina Vance
Two of her first disciples were women; the three ultimately became known as
the high priestesses of the regional theatre movement. Nina Vance was Margo
Jones’s assistant at the Houston Community Players where she caught both
Jones’s enthusiasm and penchant for theatre-in-the-round. After both left the
Players, Vance began teaching and directing for Houston’s Jewish Community
Center and mounting productions in a dance studio in an alley off Main Street.
At her instigation, the group of amateurs soon evolved into the Alley Theatre.
As the legend goes, Vance had $2.14 in her pocket, so sent out 214 postcards
at a penny a piece declaring: “It’s Beginning! Do you want a New Theater for
Houston? Meeting 3617 Main, Tuesday, October 7, 8 PM, Bring a Friend! Nina
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Vance.” The hundred people who attended formed the core of that new
theatre which premiered 18 November 1947, with Vance’s production of Harry
Brown’s A Sound of Hunting.
To borrow Fichandler’s characterization, Vance was the Alley Theatre from
1947 until her death in 1980. During those thirty-three years, she produced all
245 Alley shows, directed 102 of them, and garnered three major Ford
Foundation grants for the theatre. Vance became noted for passionate, unconventional stagings that frequently went beyond the arena into what would
become known in the sixties as environmental theatre (see Carlson’s discussion below) and was a frequent guest director at other regional houses,
notably Fichandler’s Arena Stage.
Zelda Fichandler
Zelda Fichandler was Jones’s second great disciple and would unofficially take
over as a major spokesperson for the regional movement after her death in
1955. Fichandler founded Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in 1950 with her
husband Thomas, an economist who eventually became the theatre’s business manager, and George Washington University theatre professor Edward
Magnum, under whose tutelage Fichandler had received her master’s degree
earlier that year. The triumvirate converted an old movie house into a 247-seat
theatre-in-the-round and produced seventeen plays in their first season.
Fichandler reprinted the program note for the 16 August 1950 opening production, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, in “Institution-As-Artwork,” as
she reconsidered the beginnings of regional theatres:
Arena Stage plans to bring to its audiences the best of plays both old and
new as well as worthwhile original scripts on a permanent year-round repertory basis. Local in origin, it was founded in the belief that if drama-hungry
playgoers outside of the ten blocks of Broadway are to have a living stage,
they must create it for themselves. Arena Stage was financed by
Washingtonians – students, teachers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, government workers, housewives – who love theatre and who want to see it flourish
in the city in which they work and live. Its permanent staff of distinguished
actors and technicians, many of whom have come to Arena Stage via the
stages of other cities, now all call Washington their home.
Arena Stage invites your participation in the excitement of the first production of Washington’s playhouse-in-the-round. (1–2)
From a perspective of thirty-five years (she penned this observation in 1985),
Fichandler was impressed by how many potentials and pitfalls of the regional
movement were embedded in key words and phrases of this first program
note, long before anything like a mission statement was ever contemplated:
old and new plays, permanent, repertory, local in origin, outside of Broadway,
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drama-hungry playgoers, create it themselves, permanent staff, home, participation, excitement. These concepts eventually were fleshed out as operating
principles for a professional resident theatre:
The need for artistic control; the need to take responsibility for one’s own
vision; the value of an ongoing collective; the centrality of an acting
company; the fundament of contact between play and playgoer, of a continuing dialogue with the audience; each individual theatre being a part of a
whole theatre; the ever-present budgetary tension and the success/failure
see-saw; and the primitive yet sophisticated power of selflessness and faith
in the dream. (2–3)
Fichandler assumed total artistic control of Arena two years after it opened
when Magnum left to take a post at a theatre in Hawaii, and she remained in
charge until 1991 when her hand-picked successor took over. In those four
decades, she maintained a strong artistic collective while watching several
acting companies come and go, moved out of two temporary houses to build
what gradually became a three-theatre complex (the 811-seat Arena built in
1961, the thrust-stage Kreeger with a 500-seat fan-shaped auditorium built in
1971, and the Old Vat, a 165-seat cabaret theatre installed in the basement of
the Kreeger in 1976), and spearheaded the first regional theatre to send a play
to Broadway (The Great White Hope in 1968) and be recognized by Broadway
with the first Antoinette Perry Award given in recognition of excellence by a
regional theatre (April 1976).
Another distinction of Arena was that it operated as a commercial theatre
for its first nine years and, even after declaring not-for-profit status in 1959,
continued to finance its operations heavily through box office receipts for the
next six years. Major grant funding, beginning in 1959, helped develop both
the company and the building quickly and Arena, along with the Alley, was
among the first regional theatres funded by the Ford and later Rockefeller
Foundations.
Irving and Blau
Not all the regional pioneers were women. Two San Francisco State College
professors, with actress wives anxious for professional work in what was then
the theatre-barren city of San Francisco, launched The Actor’s Workshop in
1952. Jules Irving and Herbert Blau, both native New Yorkers, wanted to create
a space for individuals to work and experiment (hence the name Actor’s
Workshop in the singular) in a permanent community of dedicated ensemble
players that was as far Off-Broadway as possible. In this respect, it sounded
very much like the Alley and Arena; unlike these other theatres, however, the
Workshop made little effort to reach out to the larger San Francisco community. The Workshop became a popular in-spot for Bay Area literati, premiering
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many new American plays and mounting productions of European playwrights like Beckett, Pinter, and Brecht. A repertoire standard, Waiting For
Godot, with Irving playing Lucky, when performed at San Quentin penitentiary,
inspired the inmates to form the San Quentin Drama Workshop under Actor’s
Workshop auspices. Godot and other productions also traveled to New York
and the Brussels and Seattle World’s Fairs, all earning positive press notices.
The Workshop was also among the pioneer group of regional theatres to
obtain Ford Foundation grants.
The Actor’s Workshop, ironically, was well respected everywhere except at
home. This situation, untenable for any regional theatre, ultimately spelled
the Workshop’s doom. Joseph Zeigler, who joined the company in 1963 and
wrote about it in his book Regional Theatre, characterized its thirteen-year
residence in San Francisco as a “hate affair with the city” where it always was
shabbily housed, radically opinioned, and firmly anti-establishment. Blau and
Irving were not interested in playing political games to garner favor and
support (hence they frequently were out of money), but remained united in
their stand “to be experimental, to embrace blatantly unpopular ideas, to
stretch beyond their immediate obvious capabilities, and to speak out against
rigidities of form and formality” (Zeigler, Regional Theatre, 56). The Workshop
in San Francisco disbanded soon after Blau and Irving moved to New York
early in 1965 to become joint directors of the ill-fated Repertory Theater of
Lincoln Center and took a core of San Francisco actors, technicians and
administrators with them. Blau and others left within a year while Irving
stayed on for seven years to manage a much changed Repertory Theatre that
bore little if any resemblance to The Actor’s Workshop that fathered it.
Catalysts
Blau, Irving, Fichandler, Vance, and other regional pioneers, including Joseph
Papp, who was working with like-minded fervor in New York City, were
brought together for the first time in 1957 under the auspices of W. McNeil
Lowry and the Ford Foundation. That year, Ford initiated a program in
support of the arts, named Lowry director, and authorized him to commence
exploratory fieldwork at once. The first small grants were awarded to artistic
directors, principally to allow them to travel and study other theatres at work,
and Lowry sponsored the first of many conferences that introduced people
working in isolation to a supportive network of artists and companies across
America. Zeigler considers this the real beginning of the regional theatre
movement in the United States, a movement that flourished during the sixties
with major foundation support and with the 1965 establishment of the
National Endowment for the Arts, governmental support, the founding of
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more and more theatres nationwide, and a prevalent belief that a cultural
explosion was sweeping the country.
Lowry addresses both the so-called arts explosion and Ford’s timely patronage in his 1978 study, The Performing Arts and American Society. He dates
the new American obsession with culture to the fifties when community
leaders argued that the arts were good for society by promoting a strong
national image, showcasing American artistry to the world, and by providing
liberal education to American citizens, especially the youth for whom art provided “purposeful occupation.” More importantly, perhaps, art ensconced in
physical institutions (museums, orchestras, ballet companies, and resident
theatres) gave communities a source of civic pride and terrific fodder for business and travel brochures that proudly proclaimed “we have culture.” Lowry
points out that, typically, arguments in favor of art rarely focused on art itself
but, rather, art as a means to some other end, and that the so-called culture
explosion itself was largely promotional.
Whatever the rationale, there certainly was a lot more money being channeled into the arts during the sixties and regional theatres were prime beneficiaries. But the money providers frequently were more interested in creating
cultural institutions than in artists making art. Michael Murray, who resigned
as artistic director of Boston’s Charles Playhouse in 1968, voiced his concerns
on the institutional malaise of regional theatres in a series of articles in the
Boston Sunday Globe. These theatres “claim an existence and an importance
apart from whatever life may be observed on their respective stages,” he complained, and “are geared to serving the community in the same way as the
public library and the museum . . . as essential ingredients of the cultural life
of the cities.” Rather than being collectives of actors, playwrights, directors,
and designers, he saw these theatres as groups of administrators, boards of
directors, ladies’ committees, season subscribers, and other non-artists.
Furthermore, he found that although a vital part of the city’s image of itself,
the theatres were patronized by only a small minority of the local citizenry.
The citizens, for their part, were happy to have the theatre there so long as
they did not have to support it.5
Murray’s view, although extreme, was not uncommon, and points out the
problem shared by directors across the country of balancing the need for
funding with the theatre’s mission and artistic integrity. Even in enthusiastic
communities where people not only attend but also take an active interest in
theatre fund-raising and outreach programs, power and money are always
factors. Problems inevitably arise as initial subsidies run out and theatres,
unable to make ends meet through box office alone, have to solicit the community for what appears to be an endless request for money. Concomitantly,
there is the problem of the implied power of patronage; people who feel they
are paying for art frequently insist on some degree of control over that art. In
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the nineties, this has proven a major factor in the attacks on the National
Endowment for the Arts and, for regional directors like Zelda Fichandler, it
always has posed a problem with civic fund-raising. In an often quoted
passage from “Theatres or Institutions,” Fichandler contends that while
“theatre is a public art and belongs to its public, it is an art before it is public
and so it belongs first to itself and its first service must be self-service.”
Beware the hand that rocks the cradle, she admonishes, “for the hand that
rocks the cradle will also want to raise it in a vote” (110).
In 1962, The Ford Foundation declared that the arts constituted one of five
key funding areas for the next decade and upped its already sizable support
of regional theatre by awarding grants totaling $6.1 million to nine resident
theatres; it would supplement this with an additional $10 million over the next
ten years. The monies were geared to building the theatres’ artistic as well as
physical needs, with grants supporting playwright and director collaborations, actor ensembles, and audience development as well as funding for
architects and stage designers toward conceiving and building new theatres.
Ford’s support instigated a flurry of philanthropy from other foundations as
well as state and local governments, private citizens, and, eventually, the
federal government. As such, Ford, wittingly or not, fomented the institutionalization of regional theatres; this continues to be a critical dilemma for managing and artistic directors into the end of the twentieth century. The
question remains, would many if not most of these theatres ever have begun
or have managed to survive without subsidy? And does being institutional
automatically imply a loss of artistic integrity?
In A Theater Divided, Martin Gottfried simultaneously heralds and blames
the totality of funding, what he terms “the American Subsidy,” for the boom
in regional theatres of the early sixties. He charts a direct line between
subsidy and institution, warning that the art theatre rapidly becomes the civic
institution and with that assumes all the attendant responsibilities. The artistic director who founded a theatre to fulfill a need for personal expression
could find her/his desires thwarted by administrative, fund-raising, and
public relations obligations. “Institutions are official,” he contends. “They are
prone to sterility . . . Community stature causes creative obesity. There is a
pressure to be inoffensive, an inclination to be sleek, proper and bland. A
living theater begins to mummify and decay” (93).
Zeigler in Regional Theatre notes the same problem in a slightly different
way – by becoming institutionalized, regional theatres officially join the
Establishment with a capital “E”. Ironically, it was the Establishment theatre
of the fifties and sixties – Broadway – that impelled their very existence; in
rejecting one establishment, they opted for inclusion in another.
Establishment denotes a certain civic responsibility and connotes a rationalization for existence over and beyond the wish to produce art. Hence, the
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newly Established regional institutional theatres found themselves increasingly embroiled in community outreach, sophisticated education programs,
and season planning around shows that would lend themselves to furthering
these high-minded ideals (Regional Theatre, 170–4).
As previously noted, one of Zelda Fichandler’s principal concerns during
her forty-year tenure at Arena was the constant struggle between theatre as
an artistic entity and theatre as a corporate institution. In her 1970 article,
“Theatres or Institutions?,” she ponders the two words, musing that they exist
in a “state of uneasy tension.” “It seemed to me until quite recently,” she says,
“that when a theatre finally stopped being on the way to what it was supposed
to become and actually became it, then it would be an institution.” Institution,
she thought, meant a release from the day-to-day struggle for survival, a time
for creative rest and re-creation, and an administrative environment that
would nurture that creativity. “But it hasn’t turned out that way,” she laments,
“a seduction is what it really was, a leading-from-the-self.” Sixteen years later,
in “Institution-As-Artwork,” she is more accepting of the place of the institution within the context of making art but warns that we not confuse the business of making art with the art of making business. “Unless we get it right,”
she declares, “this ‘institution business’ is going to kill us.”
In the early sixties, in the flush of sizable funding and seemingly universal
enthusiasm for theatre, no one was yet worried about institutionalization;
they simply wanted theatres. “I think few artists have any institutional
instincts or any but the vaguest sociological impulses,” Michael Murray
opined in a 1968 Drama Review article. “Most of them simply want a place to
do their work.”6 If culture-hungry communities wanted to build a theatre,
work-hungry artists were only too happy to move in.
Several hundred theatres sprang to life in the sixties and seventies. Many
of those survived to become institutions while others never made it that far
or, once institutionalized, died because the original artistic impulse had gone.
Only one of these theatres actually arrived as an institution, and virtually
overnight it became a nationwide sensation that catapulted the regional
theatre movement into a new prominence. Unlike other regional theatres,
however, this one was founded through the concerted energies of three
doyens of the New York stage – Oliver Rea, a Broadway producer, Peter
Zeisler, a Broadway stage manager and theatre administrator, and Sir Tyrone
Guthrie, an internationally-acclaimed director. Together, they founded the
Minnesota Theatre Company, better known as the Tyrone Guthrie Theater.
The Guthrie
Guthrie relates the founding of the company and theatre bearing his name in
his book, A New Theatre. It all began with Oliver Rea’s March 1959 invitation
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5. The Guthrie Theater in 1963. Designed by Ralph Rapson and Associates in conjunction with Tyrone Guthrie and Tanya Moiseiwitsch. Pictured on the thrust stage is
Guthrie’s production of The Three Sisters. After more than thirty-five years in this
venue, in the late 1990s the Guthrie Theater is contemplating a move to new facilities.
Don B. Wilmeth Collection.
to a breakfast at New York’s Plaza Hotel, where a mutual dissatisfaction with
the commercial theatre persuaded the trio to entertain the idea of creating a
resident professional theatre in a major city outside New York. Brooks
Atkinson, chief drama critic for the New York Times, ran a piece about their
quest, inviting interested cities to apply. Seven did and, after visiting each, the
triumvirate chose Minneapolis, Minnesota. Besides offering a friendly, welcoming environment, Minneapolis had the right combination of civic-minded
young businessmen and their wives who were anxious to make their marks in
the public sector and could raise funds quickly to build the theatre structure,
its company, and its audience.
Few American theatres have opened with the fanfare that heralded the 7
May 1963 opening of the Guthrie. Critics came from New York and Chicago to
see the impressive $2.5 million, 1,400-seat thrust stage theatre built to
Guthrie’s specifications, as well as the opening productions (Hamlet and The
Miser) of a classical repertory season performed by an acting company fea-
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turing the noted husband–wife team of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. The
theatre design, although attributed to Minnesota architect Ralph Rapson, was
largely the joint creation of Guthrie and his frequent design collaborator,
Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who built the polygonal, stepped stage that jutted deeply
into a raked auditorium in emulation of their successful 1957 collaboration for
the Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario. The star-studded
acting company was a first in regional theatre, where companies of
well-trained but largely unknown actors were the norm. The classical repertory with occasional American plays that, in Guthrie’s view, held promise for
classical status, was typical of the regionals, but the praise accorded
Minneapolis for its daring to produce such non-commercial playwrights as
Molière helped to legitimize other regionals doing the same thing.
Rapid Growth
Legitimacy is, in fact, at the core of the Guthrie’s sphere of prestige and influence. Although resident companies not afforded the luxuries of the big names
and high finance that propelled the Guthrie may have been jealous or angry,
they benefited from the afterglow of the Guthrie’s success. National attention
finally was being paid to theatre outside of New York; theatres that already
existed gained new prominence and new ones began to spring up all over.
With communities now feeling they really ought to have a theatre, significant
funding coming from prestigious foundations, and models such as the Guthrie
that boasted innovative marketing and management techniques (and willing
to serve as a resource for fledgling theatres), founding and operating a resident theatre became a slightly easier task during the sixties and seventies.
Some, like the Guthrie, were born with full community support and substantial financing – Seattle Repertory Theatre (1963) and the Mark Taper Forum
(1967), founded as part of the Center Theatre Group at the Los Angeles Music
Center – are two prominent examples. Many others were, like their predecessors, born of the drive and determination of talented young directors who
now had the dual advantage of established precedent and a far more welcoming arts climate. This new breed of artistic director, intent on success and survival, was more savvy politically, more ingratiating to the community power
structure, and more adept at marketing and advertising than many predecessors. Among the most prominent of the new theatres were Center Stage
(Baltimore, 1963), Trinity (Square) Repertory Company (Providence, Rhode
Island, 1963), Actors Theatre of Louisville (1964), Hartford Stage Company
(1964), South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa, California, 1964), American
Conservatory Theatre (San Francisco, 1965), Long Wharf Theatre (New
Haven, Connecticut, 1965), Alliance Theatre Company (Atlanta, 1968),
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Berkeley Repertory Theatre (1968), Omaha Magic Theatre (1968), Wisdom
Bridge Theatre (Chicago, 1974), Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Chicago,
1976), and Theatre de la Jeune Lune (Minneapolis, 1978). Many others that
had been founded earlier either grew to new prominence or transformed from
community to professional status during this era: Goodman Theatre (Chicago,
1925), Old Globe Theatre (San Diego, 1937), La Jolla Playhouse (1947),
Milwaukee Repertory Theater (1954), Dallas Theater Center (1959), Asolo
Center for the Performing Arts (Sarasota, Florida, 1960), and Cincinnati
Playhouse in the Park (1960).
Prominent regional houses that are affiliated with university degree programs and receive at least partial funding and/or in-kind support from their
host institutions include Yale Repertory Theatre (1966), McCarter Theatre
Center for the Performing Arts (Princeton, New Jersey, 1972), Syracuse Stage
(1974), PlayMakers Repertory Company (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1976),
and American Repertory Theatre (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979).
In surveying regional theatres, mention must also be made of the
Shakespeare Festivals, largely modeled on Tyrone Guthrie’s pioneering
Stratford Shakespearean Festival, Ontario, which opened in 1953 and was
rechristened in 1967 as the Stratford National Theatre of Canada. Although
the direct American copy is no longer in operation (American Shakespeare
Festival, Stratford, Connecticut, 1955), despite repeated efforts to reactivate
it, other major festivals include the U.S. forerunner, Oregon Shakespeare
Festival (1935), Utah Shakespearean Festival (1961), The Shakespeare Theatre
(Washington, D.C., 1969), and Alabama Shakespeare Festival (1972).
Three Outstanding Regional Theatres
and the Personalities that Shaped Them
William Ball and ACT
William Ball founded the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) as an itinerant company that started in Pittsburgh in 1965 and traveled around the
country before settling into its permanent home in San Francisco in January
1967. From its onset, Ball intended ACT to be the American national theatre,
producing an enormous, eclectic repertoire of new and classic plays with a
permanent company of theatre artists who are in constant training in a
Continental-style conservatory. The classes, held not only in acting but in all
other facets of theatre from history and literature through design and production, served to provide a continual exchange of knowledge and ideas that
ideally would inculcate the young and invigorate the old. The incredible
energy, dynamism, and non-stop activity of ACT is a reflection of Ball himself,
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who spearheaded the company until managerial difficulties forced his resignation in 1986. Invariably described as a mad genius who was both excessive
and compulsive, Ball was the prototypical regional artistic director who was
his theatre, as his theatre was him. He was an American version of the
European regisseur, at once dictator, visionary, teacher, father, and theatre
director of enormous talent. ACT experienced the typical readjustment difficulties after Ball’s departure, but has continued to be a major force in the
American theatre.
Jon Jory and ATL
Jon Jory did not found the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL) in 1964 but his
arrival in 1969 transformed it from a marginal Kentucky enterprise to an innovative national institution. Jory’s quiet dynamism centers on a passion for
texts that has been translated into two annual ATL events that attract national
and international attention – the Humana Festival of New American Plays and
Classics in Context. Jory founded the Humana Festival in 1976 to give visibility to promising new playwrights; later, he expanded that mission to include
an emphasis on the development of docudramas and an opportunity for nontheatrical writers to try their hand at playwriting. Playwrights whose careers
were either launched or significantly boosted at Humana include A.R. Gurney,
Beth Henley, Eduardo Machado, Donald Margulies, and Marsha Norman; nonplaywrights who Jory induced to start writing plays include Joyce Carol Oates
and William F. Buckley, Jr.
The Classics in Context series began in 1986 as a local outreach program,
originally involving thirty of Louisville’s arts organizations. Collectively, they
investigated classic plays in their historical context to make them relevant for
modern audiences. Although it is still a city-wide event, though no longer with
universal participation (due to reduced funding), the scope now involves
guest experts and audiences from all over the country. Recent investigations
include commedia dell’arte, Russian masters, and the plays of Ferenc Molnar.
Despite his ability to attract national attention, Jory has always maintained
ATL as a strongly regional theatre which bespeaks its continuing success. His
commitment to his regional audience is first and foremost and is witnessed
in the development of new plays reflective of the people and culture of
the region.
Robert Brustein and ART
Robert Brustein, the noted theatre director, writer, critic, and teacher, has the
distinction of having founded major regional theatres at two of America’s
most prestigious universities. When Dean of the Yale School of Drama,
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Brustein founded the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1966; after being ousted at
Yale by a new, largely unsympathetic administration, he went to Harvard,
establishing the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in 1979 with at least
thirty-five former Yale Rep artists in tow. The two theatres, although similar
in their artistic ideology of reinterpreting the classics in sometimes audacious
ways, unearthing neglected plays and playwrights, and launching new work,
operate quite differently. While Yale Rep is tied to the professional graduate
training program it serves as an intensive theatre laboratory, ART is a separately incorporated not-for-profit theatre only tangentially tied to Harvard and
until 1987 bearing no academic component (in that year Brustein opened the
Institute for Advanced Theater Training as a two-year, non-degree program).
Although Yale Rep has thrived under subsequent directorships, Brustein’s
Yale Rep essentially became ART in 1979. According to a 1989 article in the
Christian Science Monitor, Brustein brought ART to Harvard to serve “a community of literate, adventurous theatergoers” that lacked a major institutional
theatre. His aim was to “establish and maintain a theater that reflects both the
contemporary aesthetic and the social, political, and spiritual environment.”
Brustein’s productions tend to provoke controversy and even outrage, but he
perseveres with the strength that has made him a godfather of the regional
theatre movement. “Any theater that believes and persists in its vision,” he
insists, “will eventually draw an audience.”
Economics
The proliferation of regional theatres and other non-profit performing arts
organizations provoked the first serious studies on the economics of art. The
1966 landmark study by two Princeton University economists, William
Baumol and William Bowen, Performing Arts – The Economic Dilemma, argued
unequivocally that performing arts cannot nor should not be expected to pay
for themselves. Furthermore, the authors asserted that the arts not only will
never make money but will post ever increasing deficits. They make a compelling argument for arts subsidies and outline modes of support by individuals,
private institutions such as corporations, labor unions, universities, and foundations, and municipal, state, and federal governments.
Baumol and Bowen’s book was published just one year after the U.S.
Congress approved a bill establishing a National Foundation on the Arts and
the Humanities consisting of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and a Federal Council to
insure coordination between the two endowments and with related federal
programs. Initially, the program was modest, awarding only about $10
million to the arts annually. Although this amount would grow over the years,
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allocations were at the mercy of Congressional politics. It must also be
remembered that theatre comprises a relatively small portion of the arts,
which include everything from symphony orchestras and museums to creative writing and media arts. The allocation to the NEA Theatre Program
reached an all-time high of $10.8 million in 1981; in fiscal year 1993, theatre
received only $8.4 of the total NEA budget of $174.6 million. Most of this
money, however, was awarded to professional theatre companies with $7.2
million disseminated among 231 theatres. The 1994 Congressional elections
ushered in conservative Republican legislators largely unsympathetic to
government subsidies for the arts. For fiscal year 1996, funding for the NEA
was reduced to $99.5 million from the 1995 allocation of $162 million and, until
1999, the very continuation of the endowment remained in question.
The significance of NEA grants to regional theatres goes far beyond a dollar
amount. Winning a grant means official recognition on a national scale, significantly increasing both a theatre’s public reputation and its ability to gain
support from other funding sources. The NEA’s timely founding in 1965 not
only helped solidify and legitimize the existing resident theatres but it paved
the way for those to come by saying, in essence, theatre is important to
American society.
Despite significant funding and supportive endeavors from the NEA and
various foundations from the sixties onward (the Ford Foundation, for
instance, in addition to making grants helped the regional theatres to establish
such support structures as TCG in 1961), subsidy has always been a debated
issue. Despite Bowen and Baumol’s report and other major studies, the United
States does not acknowledge that resident professional theatre cannot survive
on box office receipts and good will. To Europeans and others, where state
subsidy of the arts is a long-standing tradition, this is both unbelievable and
scandalous. English theatre critic Irving Wardle commented in the London
Times Saturday Review as early as 24 February 1968 that while Americans are
more than willing to provide money for buildings, they are equally willing to
allow artists inhabiting the buildings to pay their own way after the first
season. While admiring a magnificent theatre such as the Guthrie, he noted,
“the European visitor is left gasping at the discovery that [it] is run without any
sustaining grant.” He discovered that while sustaining grants were acknowledged for orchestras and museums, “the theatre – as a traditional area of
profit-making – is treated simply as a business investment.” Ruth Mayleas, who
was director of the NEA Theatre Program from the late sixties through 1978,
concurs, noting in a Summer 1979 article for the journal Theater (“Resident
Theaters”) that not a single theatre in the United States enjoys the resources
of the best European and British theatres “because the legacy of the commercial theatre is still with us.” Americans seem wedded to the notion that “theatre
should pay its own way,” and are unable to “comprehend the concept of a
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theatre institution as an ongoing entity with an artistic point of view, dedicated
to the preservation of the past and the exploration of the future.” She traces
the economic development of regional theatres and the disparity between
promise and reality:
When the resident theater movement began, and through subsequent years
of its development, its principal leaders believed that developing along with
it would be a support system, public and private resources combined in
some miraculous way to make possible the utilization of the country’s best
artistic resources. Implicit here was a concept of continuity, the development of real theater companies, companies with a full complement of artists
and support staff, companies capable of producing the most challenging
work in the repertoire . . . We got halfway there, far enough to develop theaters with continuity of artistic leadership, performing lengthy seasons of
serious repertoire to larger and increasingly discriminating audiences. But
it was the artists themselves who were – and are – subsidizing the theaters.
(“Resident Theaters,” 8)
Operations
Regional theatre has been – and will continue to be – about the needs of artists
to do their work in a nurturing environment. The artists themselves have
indeed subsidized the theatres by working long hours for low wages, and
many have left. It is rare to achieve fame and fortune in a regional house; if an
artist has ambitions for wide exposure and substantial earnings, the lure to
film and television is powerful. The theatrical unions, early on, became aware
of this dilemma and did their best to combat the problem through ensuring
decent wages and benefits for their members working regionally. In response,
the largest regional houses formed a collective bargaining alliance, the League
of Resident Theatres (LORT), to combat the unions. LORT, which represents
approximately one-third of regional theatres (including several in New York
City) negotiated its first contract in 1966 with Actors’ Equity.
Contracts with the unions are renegotiated every three years with talks
generally focused on money, more specifically, the lack of it. In a 1989 salary
dispute with the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC), then
LORT president Tom Hall, managing director of San Diego’s Old Globe
Theatre, complained, “the constraints we have are real, not a negotiating
posture. But it does throw light on just how underpaid all professionals in the
American theater really are,” he added, noting, “it’s catastrophic that we have
to go through this kind of angst just because there aren’t enough crumbs on
the table.”7
The joint dilemmas of artists and economics are further exacerbated by the
continuing decline of Broadway, which has become increasingly reliant on
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245
regional theatres for new shows and talent. Regional theatres always have
eschewed being perceived as Broadway tributaries (hence, the discomfort
with the term regional), but the lure of Broadway money and fame frequently
has led them to compromise artistic principles. As Robert Brustein points out
in a 22 May 1988 New York Times article entitled “The Siren Song of Broadway
Is a Warning,” the transfer of a regional production to a Broadway house can
provide wider exposure for a playwright, royalties to a financially strapped
theatre, and income and celebrity for regionally based artists. He warns,
however, that “the co-opting of resident theaters for the sake of Broadway
transfers spells the end of a once proud dream of an alternative theater, the
abandonment of its animating ideals and the dispersal of its membership” all
for the sake of “marketing and merchandising of product.” Although many
major plays and artists have been introduced via regional-to-Broadway transfers (Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother from ART, several August Wilson plays
including Fences and The Piano Lesson from Yale Rep, David Mamet’s
Glengarry Glen Ross from the Goodman, and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser
God from the Mark Taper Forum, to name just a few), all have effected varying
repercussions – some minimal, some dire – on their originating theatres.
Sadder still is the all too prevalent view of Broadway – by theatre artists
and the public alike – as the major theatre of America. As Martin Gottfried
argues in A Theater Divided:
The relationship of the resident theater people with Broadway is one of
love–hate. On the one hand, from the trustees through the artistic director
and minor players, they are antagonized by commercialism. Their theater is
the real theater – the artistic theater. On the other hand, they are bitterly
envious of their Broadway counterparts. Their smugness is defensive and
they don’t completely believe in their avowed superiority, inwardly giving in
to the feeling that the “real” theater is New York’s. (110–11)
The Present and the Future
Despite adversities, regional theatres are mostly surviving and many are busy
celebrating or preparing for silver plus anniversaries. No one is confidently
smug, however; continuing problems with financing, artist attrition to more
lucrative jobs, and a steadily aging audience force artistic directors to reassess their theatres’ missions and explore ways of attracting a new generation
of playgoers. TCG continues to sponsor forums for discussion and debate of
shared concerns for keeping theatre alive and vital in the late twentieth
century. A landmark series of conferences held across the country in 1987
brought together 120 artistic directors to discuss regional theatres as artistic
homes. The results, published by TCG as The Artistic Home the following year,
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underscored key concerns regarding the creative process, artists, repertoire,
audiences, structure, and practices. The single most pressing concern for the
majority of artistic directors, however, was “to find ways of keeping the most
talented artists in the theatre” while recognizing the need “to constantly
renew their commitment to making their theatres homes for artists.” A followup conference held in 1995, “Revisiting the Artistic Home,” and reported in the
November 1995 issue of American Theatre, recognized the economic downturns since the relatively lucrative eighties and proposed a redefinition of the
artistic home as not a place but a community. With the escalating costs of real
estate and building maintenance, one artistic director, whose company now
tours, suggested, “maybe we should go to the audience and leave the buildings behind.” In response, Lloyd Richards, former artistic director of the Yale
Repertory Theatre, revived the continuing dilemma of the institution. “What
we have done is develop the institutions without the artists, despite the fact
that it was generally the artists who began the theatres,” Richards lamented.
“How do we make the artist a more integral part of the theatre so that the
theatre means the artist?”
The original mission and dream of regional theatres, as a place away from
Broadway commercialism where theatre artists could exercise imagination
and take risks in developing new plays, new forms, and new approaches to the
classics and thus reach new audiences, has largely survived. Margo Jones’s
four original precepts – professionalism, presentation of classics and new
plays, permanent resident company, adequate rehearsal time – have been met
by most regional theatres, with the largest continuing problem being the
maintenance of a company. Consequently, her shared dream of a national
theatre has been realized. American regional theatre has become the national
theatre, collectively representing all areas of the country (including New York
City) with its diversity of race, ethnicity, religion, and cultural heritage. In
1995, TCG listed over 300 member theatres nationwide located in major metropolitan centers, rural communities, and urban and suburban neighborhoods, that presented nearly 60,000 performances of 3,000 productions to a
combined annual attendance of over 20 million people.
Notes
1 See Barbara Janowitz, “Theatre Facts 94,” American Theatre 12 (April 1995): 15. An
annual survey is published by Theatre Communications Group.
2 H. T. Murdock, Philadelphia Evening Ledger, Hedgerow Theatre, clippings file, Billy
Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
3 See Zelda Fichandler, “Institution-As-Artwork,” Theatre Profiles 7 (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1986): 11.
4 Ibid.
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5 Michael Murray, Boston Sunday Globe, 11 February 1968, Regional Theatre, Clippings
file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection.
6 Quoted in Richard Schechner, ed., “The Regional Theatre: Four Views,” The Drama
Review 13 (Fall 1968): 25–26.
7 Quoted in Richard Hummler, “SSDC Accepts LORT Deal, Avoiding Nonprofit War,”
Variety, 16 August 1989: 73.
Bibliography: Regional/Resident Theatre
There are few general histories of American regional theatre. To glean a comprehensive portrait, a wide range of sources that include monographs, autobiographies, dissertations, pamphlets, economic studies, personal accounts, journals, magazines, and
newspapers must be consulted.
The best general history of the regional theatre movement is Zeigler’s Regional
Theatre (1973), which was reprinted in 1977 with a new afterword that marks notable
events from 1973–76. Zeigler, who during the sixties worked in regional theatre administration and for TCG, affords an insider’s perspective that incorporates a wide cultural and sociological outlook. Berkowitz’s New Broadways up-dates Zeigler slightly but
devotes only one chapter to regional theatre. Novick’s Beyond Broadway, melds
history with critical commentary on the early years of resident theatre by profiling
thirty-six regional houses, seven professional theatres in residence at universities, and
five summer festivals. New York drama critic Martin Gottfried’s incisive critique, A
Theater Divided, also deals with the beginnings of regional theatre but his views,
although fascinating, are far more critical than historical.
Critical and/or historical perspectives of the regional theatre movement and individual theatres abound in newspapers, notably the New York Times, particularly in the
Sunday “Arts & Leisure” sections, The Drama Review, Performing Arts Journal, Theater,
Theatre (International Theatre Institute), Entertainment Design (formerly Theatre
Crafts, then TCI ), and in all TCG publications detailed at the end of this bibliography.
Key articles referenced in this chapter are in endnotes or are cited in the text with bibliographical data in the omnibus bibliography; others of note include Edward J.
Mendus, ed., “Regional Theatre ’67,” and the entire issue of Theater, Summer 1979,
devoted to “Resident Theaters in America.”
Historic antecedents are addressed in general histories, such as Taubman’s The
Making of the American Theatre, in specific histories of such enterprises as the Group
Theatre (Clurman, The Fervent Years) and the Federal Theatre Project (Flanagan,
Arena), in numerous articles in Theatre Arts and Variety, especially those covering the
development of “Little Theatres” and summer stock; and also in Theatre Arts are the
two proposals for a national theatre (both are entitled “Toward a National Theatre,”
the first, by Robert Porterfield and Robert Breen, was published in October 1945, and
the second, by Senator Irving Ives and Representative Jacob K. Javits, in April 1949).
Of specific interest regarding the forerunners of regional theatre are two grant-funded,
enthusiastic surveys of what was then described as hinterland culture: Houghton’s
Advance From Broadway, and Gard’s Grassroots Theater.
Monographs of individual theatres, many commissioned for or printed by theatre
companies as commemorative histories, include Beeson’s Thresholds: The Story of
Nina Vance’s Alley Theatre, Maslon’s The Arena, Dawidziak’s The Barter Theatre Story,
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Regional/Resident Theatre
and Danforth’s Cleveland Play House 1915–1990. The Billy Rose Theatre Collection of
the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center maintains clipping files for most regional theatres that include articles from local and national newspapers and magazines, press releases, pamphlets, and playbills.
There are numerous autobiographical and biographical accounts of regional theatre
artists and their work. First and foremost is Margo Jones’s Theatre-in-the-Round, which
became a veritable manifesto for the regional movement. There also is a good dissertation on Jones, Wilmeth’s “A History of the Margo Jones Theatre,” and a biography by
Sheehy, Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. Sir Tyrone Guthrie penned a lively
account of the founding of the Minnesota Theatre Company in A New Theatre, and the
artistic and philosophical ideology behind San Francisco’s Actor’s Workshop is chronicled in Blau’s The Impossible Theatre. Several regional theatre directors have
described their work in book-length studies, notably Schneider’s Entrances and
Vaughan’s A Possible Theatre. Fichandler has written several important articles,
notably “Theatres or Institutions?” and “Institution-As-Artwork.”
Business and economic aspects of regional theatre are detailed in Langley’s Theatre
Management and Production in America. Also of interest is the landmark study of arts
funding, Performing Arts – The Economic Dilemma by Baumol and Bowen, and The
Performing Arts and American Society edited by Lowry, which gives a good early history
of Ford Foundation and NEA subsidies.
By far the best sources on both the artistic and economic aspects of the current
regional theatre scene are published by Theatre Communications Group. TCG’s serial
publications are the biennial Theatre Profiles, which began in 1971 as a detailed listing
of historical and current data on over 200 regional theatres; American Theatre magazine, inaugurated in 1984 and issued monthly ten times a year (May/June and
July/August are combined issues), which covers all aspects of theatre nationwide and
regularly publishes full-length scripts of new plays; and Theatre Facts, published annually since 1974 and now included in the April edition of American Theatre, which is a
detailed fiscal report resulting from national surveys of non-profit professional theatres. Theatre Profiles 7, published in 1986 as a special TCG anniversary issue, contains
an historic overview of the regional movement as well as ten retrospective articles.
TCG also published The Artistic Home, edited by London, a report on the series of
nationwide meetings with 120 artistic directors held in 1987 where they explored
common artistic and managerial problems. A follow-up discussion, “Revisiting the
Artistic Home,” was held in March 1995 with a detailed report by Langworthy, “Theatre
at the Crossroads,” published in the November 1995 issue of American Theatre.
Alternative Theatre
Marvin Carlson
Editorial note: In a previous section of this chapter, Mel Gussow provided an
overview of Off- and Off-Off Broaday. Although this essay covers much of the
same ground, it does so in a more analytic way, reaching beyond New York to
other geographical centers of the United States and providing more contextualization. As will become clear, alternative theatre is not limited here to alternatives to Broadway, though anti-commercialism tends to be a common
denominator.
Origins and Background
The modern concept of alternative theatre was developed in Europe at the
close of the nineteenth century, when a number of amateurs and theatre professionals established small producing organizations outside the existing
theatre establishment to evade censorship, to explore new ideas in playwriting and staging, and to seek new or more specialized audiences. Most of the
major dramatists of the period, including Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, and
Chekhov, were closely associated with this alternative theatre, and it was, of
course, the theatrical home of the many experimental movements such as
Symbolism, Futurism, and Expressionism, that sought to bring new expressive dimensions to the art. Inspiration from the alternative theatres of Europe
arrived in America in the closing years of the century, but the major development of an American version of the European alternative theatre did not
develop until the years between 1910 and 1920, with the “Little Theatre”
movement, the best known examples of which are the Washington Square
Players (later the Theatre Guild) and the Provincetown Players (see Volume
2 for coverage of this movement). During the first half of the century the
“Little Theatres” and their offshoots provided much of the most exciting and
interesting work in American acting, directing, playwriting, and scenic design.
Despite the considerable achievement of the American alternative theatre
before 1945, and despite its distinctively American character, most of its practitioners continued to look to Europe for leadership in theatrical experimentation. While this orientation certainly did not disappear after 1945, the
postwar American alternative theatre steadily increased in self-assurance and
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in the respect it was accorded elsewhere, until by the sixties the traditional
geography of influence had been reversed and alternative theatres in Europe
and indeed around the world frequently looked to American alternative
theatre for models and inspiration.
The very concept of alternative theatre necessarily has had a different resonance in America from that in Europe, especially in the early postwar years,
since the systems of theatrical production are so different. Any European
theatre center will have large commercial theatres corresponding to
America’s Broadway theatres, but there is also a system of state-supported
theatres, with permanent companies and large repertoires centered on the
national classics, but usually including major foreign works and important
premieres as well. With the exception of the shortlived and quite special
Federal Theatre Project, discussed in the previous volume, America has never
developed such a system of national theatres, and so the alternative tradition
here from the beginning included not only the kind of small experimental ventures more typical of alternative theatre in Europe, but also large and ambitious attempts to establish European-style repertory theatres, which were in
fact alternatives to the only well-established American professional theatre,
the commercial Broadway-style house.
The hope of establishing a theatre devoted to classic and major contemporary works with a continuing company and relatively modest prices, in imitation of the European state theatres, has been a recurrent dream in America
throughout this century, from the early years of the Theatre Guild and Eva Le
Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Company in the twenties and thirties to Tony
Randall’s National Actors Theatre in the nineties. The first major postwar
attempt to fulfill this dream was the shortlived American Repertory Theatre,
founded in 1946 by Eva Le Gallienne with Margaret Webster and Cheryl
Crawford, which lasted only until 1948. One of the most successful attempts
to establish an American repertory theatre was the Association of Producing
Artists (APA) founded in 1960. After four years of touring and of residencies
in several cities it joined the Phoenix Theatre in New York, which had been
founded in 1953 for the presentation of significant plays at modest prices.
Between 1964 and its dissolution in 1970 the Phoenix-APA offered one of the
most successful examples of this type of alternative theatre.
During these same years a much more ambitious permanent repertory
theatre was planned and launched as a part of the new Lincoln Center for the
Performing Arts. Opening in 1965, this consisted of two theatres, the larger
thrust-proscenium stage, the Vivian Beaumont, and a smaller experimental
stage, originally the Forum, now the Mitzi E. Newhouse. Despite the vision of
its founders, Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead, the Lincoln Center facility was
plagued with problems from the beginning, and despite a distinguished succession of directors, has never achieved the original vision of a true alterna-
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251
tive to the New York commercial theatre. The large repertory theatres of
Europe, whose offerings include many plays per season, some of them remaining in the repertory for years, have no real equivalent in America, though
outside of New York many cities, among them Seattle, Milwaukee, Providence,
and San Francisco have since 1945 established quite successful repertory
houses. Most of these present a “modified” version of repertory, with a fairly
small number of plays that change each season. (See the previous section of
this chapter for coverage of the regional theatre movement.)
Despite their rather troubled history, regional repertory theatres and even
the more troubled repertory experiments in New York have made a considerable contribution to the vigor and the richness of American theatrical life in
the late twentieth century and provided a significant alternative to the mainstream commercial theatre. Nevertheless, the term alternative theatre does
not for most readers suggest theatre of this kind, but the smaller ventures
associated less with accomplished productions of established works than
with artistic innovation and experimentation, and it is the theatres of this type
that have had the most impact outside America.
The first distinct alternative theatre movement after 1945, as discussed by
Gussow, was the Off-Broadway movement, really a postwar extension of the
Little Theatre movement, offering a mixture of unusual or neglected classics,
new European and American plays, and a variety of experiments in methods
of production. The Off-Broadway movement, which sought to escape the commercial pressures of Broadway, had by the early sixties sufficiently fallen prey
to those pressures as to generate a felt need for a new non-commercial, experimental theatre in New York, which became known as Off-Off Broadway.
Although in a very real sense the Little Theatre movement, the repertory theatres, and the Off-Broadway movement all represented important alternatives
to the mainline commercial theatre of America, the actual term “alternative
theatre” did not come into popularity until the sixties, and was then used to
describe a wide variety of theatrical experiments, some of which were closely
related to earlier alternative theatre in the United States and in Europe, and
others of which were generated by particular social and political concerns of
that turbulent period in American cultural history.
The Living Theatre
Perhaps the best known example of American alternative theatre nationally
and internationally has been the Living Theatre of Julian Beck and Judith
Malina, and this theatre, in its almost fifty years of existence, has been closely
associated with many of the concerns that characterize this movement. Beck
and Malina began producing small plays in their own apartment in 1951 and
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during the next decade closely followed the pattern of many earlier avantgarde theatres in America and Europe, rejecting the prevailing mode of
realism and experimenting with abstract and poetic texts. They offered
several works by Gertrude Stein, along with, among others, T. S. Eliot, W. H.
Auden, Pablo Picasso, Alfred Jarry, Federico García Lorca, Jean Cocteau, and
August Strindberg. In these early productions, language was given strong
emphasis, but despite a very limited budget, visual experimentation was
involved as well. For Beyond the Mountains, an adaptation of the Oresteia by
the poet Kenneth Rexroth, the actors wore oriental masks and choreographer
Tei Ko created a sequence based on Noh dances.
One of the most ambitious of these early pieces was Paul Goodman’s
Faustina, presented at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 1952. The play depicted a
Roman legend of the period of Marcus Aurelius, and at its conclusion, after
the murder of the young hero, the scenery disappeared and the actress
playing Faustina, her body splashed with the victim’s blood, advanced to the
audience on an empty stage and berated them for not stopping the play before
this cruel deed had taken place.
Such direct address, challenging traditional theatrical illusion, became in
time a central technique in Living Theatre productions. Indeed the tension
between theatre and reality clearly led to an interest in Pirandello, whose
Tonight We Improvise was presented in 1955 and again in 1959, and to an
unusual staging of William Carlos Williams’s comedy Many Loves, where the
audience entered the theatre to find the stage bare and actors and technicians
in confusion over a blown fuse. Soon the lights were restored, the stage prepared, and the regular play begun. During the Living Theatre’s first European
tour in 1961, this unconventional opening caused a sensation.
It was Jack Gelber’s The Connection in 1959, however, that most thoroughly
illustrated the Living Theatre’s Pirandellian interests at this period and that
first brought the group to the attention of a more general public. Here the
“reality” suggested by the opening of Many Loves extended throughout the
evening. The audience entered to find a group of ragged figures on stage. One
of them introduced himself as the producer, who claimed that the others were
drug addicts who had agreed to come to the theatre and improvise on
material he had written in exchange for a fix, to be provided by Cowboy, the
“connection.” Jazz served as both model and accompaniment, since the
addicts listened to a Charlie Parker record and four of them were musicians
who do jazz improvisations. Other actors appeared as a film crew documenting these activities. During the intermission the actors panhandled the spectators for drug money, and spectators were truly confused about the borders
of reality and illusion. Clearly the musicians were real players of jazz, and it
was widely assumed that the company was really using drugs, if not addicted
to them, although this was not in fact the case. Later Judith Malina said that
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it was in The Connection that the Living Theatre actors really began to “play
themselves.” The Connection became the signature piece for the Living
Theatre in its early years, not only in America, where it remained for several
years in the repertoire, but for its first two European tours, in 1961 and 1962
(its frequent pairing with Many Loves on the first tour emphasized the playing
with reality that the two productions had in common).
The Living Theatre’s development was made much more complex by the
introduction into their work of two other quite different influences about the
time of The Connection – those of John Cage and Antonin Artaud. The Living’s
first new production after The Connection was called The Theatre of Chance,
and was strongly influenced by the theories and practice of John Cage. Cage’s
revolutionary ideas on music and aesthetics have had a profound influence
on modern experimentation in all the arts, but The Theatre of Chance was their
first significant exploration within the world of the theatre. Cage picked up
and developed a concern of the Futurists, that the concept of “music” should
be expanded to include all manner of everyday sounds, hitherto dismissed as
“noise.” This conscious introduction of non-artistic materials into art, which
Cage began in the late thirties, paralleled experiments in modern dance by
Merce Cunningham, who become a frequent collaborator with Cage, and later,
after 1955, in San Francisco’s Dance Workshop, where Ann Halprin explored
the dance possibilities of everyday activities such as walking, eating, and
bathing.
In 1948, after almost ten years of collaboration, Cage and Cunningham were
invited to spend the summer working at Black Mountain College in North
Carolina, which was emerging as a center for artistic experimentation. With
Willem De Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and others they reconstructed an
avant-garde performance from earlier in the century, Eric Satie’s The Ruse of
the Medusa. In 1952, back at Black Mountain, Cage and Cunningham collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg and others in an untitled event that has often
been cited as the model for the wave of Happenings and other performance
events that became extremely popular in the American art world of the late
fifties and early sixties. A variety of activities, each timed to the second, took
place in and around an arena audience. Cage read a Dadaist lecture, films were
projected on the ceiling, Cunningham danced in the aisles, followed by an
unplanned excited dog who was enthusiastically incorporated into the performance. David Tudor, who had worked before with Cage, poured water from
one bucket into another.
This event was taken as a model by Cage in the course on experimental
music that he began to teach at New York’s New School for Social Research in
1956. Many of the pioneers in the New York avant-garde art of the sixties –
poets, filmmakers, painters, and musicians – found inspiration in these
classes, which stressed the performative nature of art and the process of its
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creation over the finished product. Typical of the new orientation was an
interview with the experimental artist “Woks” in Art News in 1959 in which he
stated “what counts is no longer the painting but the process of creation”
(Pierre Schneider, “Interview with Woks,” 62). Among the students in Cage’s
course was Allan Kaprow, who developed Cage’s ideas in his own way in the
1959 presentation at the Reuben Gallery which he called 18 Happenings in 6
Parts, featuring a number of simple activities simultaneously performed in
three different spaces. This event established for the public and the press the
“Happening” as a major new avant-garde artistic activity, which it remained
throughout the sixties.
John Cage was among those invited to the performances of the Living
Theatre in the early fifties, and Merce Cunningham occasionally did choreography there. The interest of both in incorporating into art material of everyday life and in emphasizing process over product clearly related closely to the
company whose major works to date had been Many Loves and The
Connection. For The Theatre of Chance, the next new work after The
Connection, John Cage worked out a system to guarantee a highly controlled
randomness in the selection of elements to be presented each evening of a
script by Jackson MacLow, The Marrying Maiden. Such matters as the volume
of the voice, the speed of delivery, and the emotional tone of the speech
(selected from approximately one hundred terms such as sad, gay, and so
forth) were all determined afresh each evening according to the rule of chance
derived from the the Oriental I Ching, Cage’s preferred source of random selection. Rolls of dice determined the order in which lines were read as well as the
utilization of the “music” of the piece, created by Cage from distorted tapes
of the actors reading their lines.
Although Cage’s interest in found material was attractive to the Living
Theatre, his rather coldly formal methods were less so, and a deeper and
longer-lasting influence provided them with a passionate intensity lacking in
this approach. This was the writings of Antonin Artaud. Although Artaud was
deeply involved as an actor, director, and theorist in the experimental theatre
world of France between the world wars, he was generally regarded as a minor
figure at that time. It was only in the sixties that he became widely regarded
as one of the central figures of modern avant-garde theatre, and the centrality given to his work by the Living Theatre was one of the major reasons for
this. The Theatre and Its Double, the first collection of Artaud’s writings translated into English, appeared in 1958 and was avidly read by Beck and Malina,
who saw in it an expression of many of their own most deeply held beliefs
about the power and purpose of theatre. Central to these was a feeling that
conventional art and indeed modern civilization erected a barrier between
human beings and their deepest and most authentic feelings, desires, and
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needs, and that ideally theatre should break through that barrier, a painful but
liberating process.
The production in which these Artaudian concerns were first strongly
articulated was The Brig, a slice-of-life depiction of existence in a U.S. Marine
Corps brig in Japan, written by a former prisoner, Kenneth Brown. An authentic prison scene was recreated on stage and actors in rehearsal and performance were subjected ruthlessly to its routine and its ugly physical
punishments. The preface to the published play, written by Beck, claimed that
after 1958 the ghost of Artaud had become their mentor and their goal had
become to create the kind of “complusive, plague-ridden” spectacle of which
he dreamed, one that would profoundly disturb its audience, shake them out
of conventional expectations, and leave them cleansed and with new perspectives.
Despite its close connection with the metaphysical concerns of Artaud, The
Brig also had clear political implications, about the coercive and violent
nature of American society in general and the American military establishment in particular. The Living Theatre had been gradually moving from its
initial focus on an alternative theatre to one which united this and an interest
in alternative politics. The Brig was the clearest illustration of this so far, especially after October 1963, when the Internal Revenue Service closed the
theatre for non-payment of taxes. The company resisted, breaking into the
padlocked theatre and performing The Brig in defiance of the authorities.
When they refused to vacate the premises, twenty-five were arrested. The
pacifist anarchism manifested in this resistance, and in the theatrical behavior of the accused in the subsequent trial, provided a model and inspiration
for the widespread resistance to political authority in the American alternative theatre in the following years. Malina and Beck “paid their debt” to the
system with a fine and brief jail terms, but their American career was for the
time being completed. The core of the company departed for Europe, where
they toured as a kind of exiled artistic commune until 1968, achieving an
almost mythic status among devotees of alternative theatre in Europe and
America.
The Open Theatre
As reports of the Living Theatre’s continued experiments drifted back from
Europe, other groups and individuals, many of them building directly upon
the Living Theatre’s initiatives, began the rapid expansion of alternative
theatre that occurred in America in the sixties. One of the most influential of
these was Joseph Chaikin, who had been a member of the Living Theatre since
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1959 and an actor in most of its productions from Many Loves onward. He did
not follow the company into exile, however, but remained behind in New York.
He and Peter Feldman, another Living Theatre actor, had both been students
of Nola Chilton, who also left America at this time to settle in Israel. Chaikin
and Feldman gathered a group of writers and other actors, many of them
Chilton’s students, to establish an ongoing cooperative theatre group which
they called the Open Theatre, to distinguish it from the closed theatre of
Broadway. This group shared the Living Theatre’s dream of a continuing
ensemble, and one of their first productions was a theatrical tribute to their
forebears, a documentary drama called The Trial of Judith Malina and Julian
Beck, but ultimately they were less concerned with political matters than with
developing the ability of theatre to express individual dreams and feelings in
a depersonalized society. Feeling that most existing approaches to acting had
become sterile and formulaic, the Open Theatre explored new directions and
techniques. Particularly influential were improvisational games based upon
the work of Viola Spolin in Chicago. In her home city, Spolin’s work in encouraging spontaneous and improvisatory performance was carried on by her son
Paul Sills, who co-founded two of the leading improvisatory theatres in
modern America, the Compass Players, in 1955, and Second City, in 1959.
Kristin Linklater instructed the actors in voice and Joseph Schlichter in sensitivity training based on Gestalt therapy, and in time the Open Theatre developed a strong technique and a distinctive style, but perhaps the group was
best known for its collaborative approach. Although Chaikin was the dominant figure, he did not work as a conventional director. The company’s most
typical productions were painstakingly assembled from the contributions of
the individual actors, all given an equal importance. It was the Open Theatre
more than any other group that popularized the idea of “collective creations”
– group-created works that became one of the favored examples of alternative
theatre work in the sixties.
In the early days of the Open Theatre, as its philosophy and technique were
developing, a number of playwrights worked closely with it, particularly
Megan Terry, Jean-Claude Van Itallie, and Maria Irene Fornés. In 1966, Terry
developed a folk-rock collage commentary on the Vietnam War, Viet Rock, out
of an Open Theatre workshop, their first long work from an improvisational
base. Van Itallie composed three short plays, collectively called America
Hurrah, that were a major Off-Broadway success this same year, but the group
became concerned that such work was taking them in a commercial and conventional direction, and their subsequent work was devoted more specificially to collective experimentation. Probably the best known of the Open
Theatre productions was The Serpent, developed in 1967 from exercises and
improvisations based primarily upon the Book of Genesis, but weaving in references to contemporary deeds of violence such as the assassinations of
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President Kennedy and of Martin Luther King. Terminal (1969) grew out of
meditations on human mortality, and, although written by Susan Yankowitz,
was derived entirely from the actors’ own images. That year the company
toured to Paris, London, and Amsterdam, but in the course of the tour already
existing divisions concerning the social, political, and artistic goals of the
Open Theatre became more serious, and upon their return to America they
disbanded. Chaikin re-formed the company with only six actors, who continued to perform Terminal and added two further works exploring the actors’
individual responses to universal human concerns – The Mutation Show, in
1971, concerning the process of adaptation to changing social circumstances,
and Nightwalk, in 1973, concerned with sleep and consciousness. The group
finally disbanded at the end of the 1973 season and Chaikin contined to direct
for theatres in New York and California until he suffered aphasia from a stroke
in 1984. In the nineties, however, he returned to the stage, first as an actor in
plays co-authored by Sam Shepard (The War in Heaven) and Van Itallie (Struck
Dumb) reflecting this experience, and subsequently also as a director of new
experimental work, one of the most loved and revered figures in the American
experimental theatre.
San Francisco Mime Troupe
Probably the most familiar image of the alternative theatre of the 1960s is that
of politically engaged production, and indeed the amount and variety of such
activity at this time was unparalleled in American theatre history.
One of the first and longest-lasting of such groups was the San Francisco
Mime Troupe, founded in 1959 by R.G. Davis. The early work of this company
was focused less on specific political concerns than on exploring an acting
approach opposed to traditional psychological realism and drawing upon the
more physical tradition of the circus, variety entertainment, and particularly
the commedia dell’arte. In the early sixties the company favored literary works
in the commedia tradition by authors such as Molière and Goldoni, but their
interest in performing in parks and other non-traditional spaces and in interjecting into the scripts, in the tradition of the commedia, references to current
news events, gave them a distinct political flavor from the beginning. This
became more marked with the growing political radicalism in the mid-sixties
within the cultural community of San Francisco and indeed across America. A
growing opposition to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was central to this
political climate. The Mime Troupe presented its first commentary on
Vietnam in 1965, and two years later, not long after Terry’s Viet Rock in New
York, a full-length work on the subject, a highly contemporary adaptation of
Goldoni’s L’Amant militaire. In 1965 also the Mime Troupe engaged another
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major political issue, racism in America, with their Minstrel Show or Civil
Rights in a Cracker Barrel.
In the summer of 1966, R.G. Davis contributed an article entitled “Guerrilla
Theatre” to an issue of the Tulane Drama Review devoted largely to emerging
political concerns in the theatre. In addition to Davis’s article, the issue contained a report on a recent TDR-sponsored conference on this subject and an
article by Saul Gottlieb reporting on the recent activity of the Living Theatre
in Europe and stressing their political concerns. Scene 4 of their new work,
Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, Gottlieb noted, was focused upon protest to the
Vietnam War. During the late sixties and early seventies political concerns
dominated American alternative theatre. In 1965 Luis Valdez joined the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, and that same year Cesar Chavez organized the first
strike of migrant workers against the grape growers in California. Valdez,
whose parents were such workers, began organizing short comic skits, called
actos, mixing Spanish and English and using many of the same comic traditions as the San Francisco Mime Troupe to deal with the concerns of the
workers. Their short skits were designed to be performed on picket lines and
in workers’ rallies for the United Farm Workers.
El Teatro Campesino and Chicano Theatre
Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino soon became one of America’s best-known political theatres. It received an Obie Award in 1968 for its contributions to
Workers’ Theatre, and performed across the country, even before the Senate
Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. It was inspirational in the founding of
what eventually amounted to more than a hundred Chicano theatres scattered all across the country. Among the best known of these was Jorge
Huerta’s Teatro de la Esperanza in Santa Barbara, California, and Joe Rosenberg’s Teatro Bilingüe in Kingsville, Texas. In 1971 a national network, TENAZ
(El Teatro Nacional de Aztlàn) was established among these groups. The first
festival of such theatre was held in Fresno, California, in 1966, and responsibility for such festivals became one of the projects of TENAZ.
In the early seventies the Teatro Campesino began seeking a more spiritual
foundation for their social concerns, and they began to introduce Indian and
particularly Mayan material into their work and their lives. They formed a
community based on Mayan models and sought to develop a performance
practice, called Theatre of the Sphere, drawing upon Mayan and Aztec beliefs.
The fifth annual festival of Chicano theatre (1974) was held at the pyramids of
Teotihuacan, just outside Mexico City, and for this the Teatro created one of
their most mystic works, El Baile de los Gigantes, recreating an actual Mayan
religious ceremony more than a thousand years old. Mayan elements were
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also important in El Fin del Mundo (1975), but these were beginning to be overtaken by elements of a new Campesino style, called the corrido, based on the
form and stories of traditional narrative folk ballads. Interest also shifted from
farm workers to the urban Chicano, leading to Valdez’s most widely known
work, Zoot Suit (1978), premiered in Los Angeles and then moved to New York,
where it was advertised as the first Chicano play on Broadway. Valdez, who
had been moving toward mainstream theatre for some time, was widely criticized for openly joining it here, though he pointed to the poor reception of the
play in New York as evidence that on the contrary, mainstream audiences
found it too political. In any case the original Teatro was near its end. In 1980
it ceased to exist as a collective ensemble and became a more traditonal production company, though still, of course, devoted to Chicano theatre.
Although the Chicano theatre has attracted more attention, largely due to
the visibility of Luis Valdez, the sixties also saw developing on the East Coast,
centered in New York, a Spanish-speaking alternative theatre dedicated to the
concerns of this community, made up primarily of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and
the so-called Nuyoricans (New York-born Hispanics). The best known of such
groups is probably the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, founded in 1967 and
led by Miriam Colón, but John C. Miller in the Spring 1978 issue of the Revista
Chicano-Riqueña discusses an impressive number of similar groups active in
New York between 1965 and 1977.
Black Theatres
Another pioneer in modern American ethnic theatre, with goals and concerns
very similar to those of El Teatro Campesino, was the Free Southern Theatre.
Just as the Campesino was closely associated with organized political action
through Chavez’s strikes and the United Farm Workers, the Free Southern
Theatre was closely tied to the Liberation Movement in the early sixties that
sought to produce political, social, and economic changes in the lives of
Southern African Americans. John O’Neal, one of the founders of FST, was a
field director for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in
Jackson, Mississippi, and Gilbert Moses was a writer for a liberal newspaper
in that city. In 1963 they met and began to plan for a theatre to encourage black
reflection and social awareness. The following year they sought advice from
Richard Schechner, then a professor at Tulane University, and over the next
five years Schechner was an influential member of the Board of Directors,
eventually editing the major chronicle of this theatre. As Schechner’s presence indicates, FST in its early years was an integrated venture in its administration and its company, though this was soon to change with the
development of Black Nationalism.
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The FST opened in 1964 in New Orleans with Martin Duberman’s documentary drama In White America, and during the next two seasons they toured
through small towns in Mississippi and Tennessee with this and Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot. In 1965 they also toured to New York City, which would
during the next few years become the center of the black theatre movement,
as Southern California was for the Chicano theatre. Among the pioneers of
modern black theatre in New York were Roger Furman, a playwright and director who founded the New Heritage Players in 1965, and Ernie McClintock, an
actor who established the Afro-American Studio in 1966. One of the best
known black theatres of this period was the New Lafayette, founded in Harlem
in 1966 by Robert Macbeth, with Ed Bullins as playwright in residence. In 1971
the Black Theatre Alliance was formed in New York for mutual support and
publicity. Its first newsletter (in 1973) listed sixteen member companies, all in
New York. By 1977 its membership was national and included fifty-two organizations.
A major tension in the black theatre movement in the mid-sixties concerned integration. Harold Cruse in his 1967 book The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual insisted that the entire organizational structure of theatre and
other cultural institutions must be controlled by blacks if such institutions
had any hope of avoiding the traditional usurpation of power by the AngloSaxon majority. The majority of black theatres in the late sixties turned in this
direction, and many of them toward the more distinctly radical political position represented most notably by LeRoi Jones, who changed his name to
Amiri Baraka when he became the leader of the movement that saw theatre
as a weapon in the struggle for black liberation. He founded the Black Arts
Repertory Theatre in Harlem in 1965 and Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey,
in 1967, which premiered the best known of his revolutionary pieces, the historical pageant Slave Ship in 1967. The best-known company that continued
in the late sixties to operate with an integrated administration and to avoid
distinctly revolutionary plays was New York’s Negro Ensemble Company,
founded in 1967 by actor Robert Hooks, playwright-director Douglas Turner
Ward, and producer-director Gerald Krone. The NEC suffered a good deal of
adverse criticism for this moderate position, but its measured and pragmatic
approach has paid off in longevity; though it struggles, it is one of the few
experimental theatres established in the late sixties that still survives.
Other Minority Theatres
Many minority and disadvantaged groups in America looked to the theatre
during the late sixties and early seventies as did these ethnic minorities to
provide a forum to articulate their concerns and to encourage a wider public
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awareness of their situation. The National Theatre of the Deaf was formed in
1967 to provide opportunities for deaf actors and audiences, but their use of
mime, music, dance, and narration has also allowed all audiences to appreciate their work. Tale Spinners was formed in San Francisco to respond to the
needs and interests of the elderly, and in New York Arthur Strimling founded
Roots and Branches to encourage cross-generational communication by
mixing very old and very young performers. The Family, formed in New York
in 1972, provided ex-prisoners with an opportunity to create theatre for presention both in prisons and outside.
Aside from ethnic theatre, the most important of the many alternative
minority theatres have been those concerned with gender and sexual orientation. In 1965 playwright Ronald Tavel and director-performer John Vaccaro
founded in New York the Play-House of the Ridiculous, a homosexual transvestite theatre devoted to camp parody of old films and outrageous satire of
all aspects of contemporary life and culture. As free-wheeling in their iconoclasm as the earlier Dadaists, the Ridiculous founders prided themselves as
being “the only non-academic avant-garde.” In 1967 one of the Ridiculous
actors, Charles Ludlam, left to form his own troupe, the Ridiculous Theatrical
Company, which under his leadership and with his inspired acting and playwriting, brought camp performance to mainstream attention. Ludlam once
called his company a “mythic reincarnation” of Molière’s use of commedia
dell’arte and indeed Ludlam himself has been called a “modern Molière.” After
several sprawling and largely improvisational works in the late sixties, Ludlam
turned to more conventionally structured works, often based on a specific
well-known play, film, or novel, but liberally sprinkled with wide-ranging references to popular culture, gay culture, and the literary tradition. The first of
these was Bluebeard (1970), which was also the first Ludlam work to be widely
reviewed. Camille (1974), with Ludlam in the title role, surprisingly brought
audiences from laughter to tears at its conclusion. In 1977 Ludlam further displayed his versatility with a parody of Wagner, Der Ring Gott Farblonjet. In 1978
the Company moved into a permanent home in Greenwich Village, where they
remained regularly producing until 1996. Ludlam created another memorable
female, a Maria Callas look-alike, in the 1983 Galas, and in 1984 produced his
best-known work, the gothic thriller The Mystery of Irma Vep, an acting tour de
force in which he and his co-star Everett Quinton played all seven roles. His
last work before his tragically early death in 1986 was The Artificial Jungle, a
pet shop parody of Zola’s grim tale Thérèse Raquin. Ludlam’s work was carried
on after his death by Quinton with revivals, new plays by other authors, and
solo performances by Quinton of such classics as A Tale of Two Cities (1989)
and Phaedra (1996).
During the early seventies performers from the San Francisco Cockettes
established a New York version of that anarchic transvestite theatre with such
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productions as Razzmatazz (1974), while other members left behind in San
Francisco formed the Angels of Light, offering such camp spectacles as the
mock-Indian epic Holy Cow (1979). The leading gay–lesbian theatre in the San
Francisco area, however, was Rhinoceros, founded in 1977 by Allan Estes. The
opening production, inspired by a 1977 workshop at Berkeley by Polish
experimental director Jerzy Grotowski, was Gayhem, a Happening. By 1980 the
company had achieved sufficient visibility to become the first gay company
in the United States to receive funding from the National Endowment for the
Arts and the first to offer a subscription season. In 1982 the theatre presented
its first lesbian play, Jane Chambers’s My Blue Heaven.
Feminist Groups
An important part of the American alternative theatre from around 1970
onward was individuals and groups exploring feminist concerns. The first
such groups were closely related to the women’s consciousness-raising
groups of the late sixties and early seventies, seeking to provide a voice for
women’s concerns and a forum for the dreams, memories, hopes, and fantasies of women. Such groups appeared from coast to coast: the Caravan
Theatre in Lexington, Massachusetts (1965), The Rhode Island Feminist
Theatre in Providence (1973), Lucy Winer’s and Claudette Charbonneau’s
New York Feminist Theatre (1969), the Westbeth Playwrights’ Feminist
Collective and the It’s All Right to be a Woman Theatre (both founded in New
York in 1970), the Omaha Magic Theatre (1969), At The Foot of the Mountain
(Minneapolis, 1974), Synthaxis Theatre (South Pasadena, California, 1972),
Lilith – A Women’s Theatre (San Francisco, 1974). Such groups directly and
indirectly inspired many others, enough to be listed in 1980 in a substantial
volume, Feminist Theatre Groups, by Dinah Luise Leavitt, and revisited in a
more recent book, Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A, by Charlotte Canning.
In 1971 Roberta Sklar, a co-director with Joseph Chaikin at the Open
Theatre, attended a performance at the It’s All Right to be a Woman Theatre
and was inspired to work in a similar direction. She first joined forces with
Sondra Segal at the Womanrite Theatre Ensemble, which Segal founded in
1972, then with both Segal and writer Clare Cross to establish in 1976 one of
the leading women’s theatre collaboratives, The Women’s Experimental
Theatre (WET). The first and best known work of this ensemble (which Sklar
and Segal continued until 1985) was a trilogy of plays, The Daughters Cycle,
made up of Daughters, Sister/Sister, and Electra Speaks (produced between
1977 and 1981), exploring the role of women in the Western patriarchal family.
Another member of Chaikin’s Open Theatre to establish a feminist theatre
was Muriel Miguel, who founded a shortlived consciousness-raising theatre,
Womanspace, and then in 1976 a much more long-lasting and influential
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ensemble, Spiderwoman. Spiderwoman was a Hopi goddess who taught her
people designs and weaving, and the group developed a collective improvisational approach which they named “storyweaving.” The original group of
seven women sought to bring together women of various ethnicities, sexual
orientation, and age, and their first production, Women and Violence, in 1976,
wove together autobiographical material with an historical study of women’s
oppression even under men battling for ethnic freedom. In 1981, however, the
variety of backgrounds in the group, originally seen as a strength, began to
create tensions, and the group split into two, both important in the alternative theatre of the next decade – Spiderwoman and Split Britches. The core of
Spiderwoman since 1981 has been the three American Indian sisters Lisa
Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel, who have performed primarily at the
alternative theatre showcase Theater for the New City and at the American
Indian Community House, both on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Their
The Three Sisters from Here to There (1982) was, as its title suggests, primarily a takeoff on Chekhov, but more typically, their productions (Sun, Moon,
Feather, 1981; 3 Up, 3 Down, 1987; Winnetou’s Snake Oil Show from Wigwam
City, 1988; Reverb-ber-ber-ations, 1990) have mixed autobiography, history,
popular culture, and literary references in complex and highly theatrical
explorations of Indian identity in America.
The core of Split Britches has been Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, who first
collaborated on a version of Split Britches, based on the lives of Weaver’s aunts
in the Virginia mountains. It was presented at the first Women’s One World
Festival of feminist theatre, held in New York in the fall of 1980. The play continued to develop, receiving its final form when playwright-performer Deb
Margolin joined Weaver and Shaw in it. This version was presented at the
second WOW Festival in 1981, in which Weaver, Shaw, and Margolin appeared
as a new company, taking their name from this play. In 1982 Weaver and Shaw
founded the WOW Café in New York, dedicated to producing works by and for
women, and Split Britches offered its next play, Beauty and the Beast. Since
that time the members of Split Britches have been an important part of the
alternative feminist theatre, performing in a variety of combinations. The original trio have created Upwardly Mobile Homes (1984), Little Women (1988), and
Lesbians Who Kill (1992); Shaw and Weaver alone created a celebration of
their ongoing relationship, Anniversary Waltz in 1989; and during the nineties
Deb Margolin has become better know as a solo performer, in such works as
Gestation (1991), Of Mice, Bugs, and Women (1994), and Oh Wholly Night
(1996).
Shaw and Weaver under the title Split Britches have also created important
work with other collaborators. The first of these was Holly Hughes, with
whom they created Dress Suits to Hire in 1987. Hughes came to the attention
of the lesbian community with her darkly erotic The Lady Dick at WOW Cafe
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6. Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver in Split Britches’ production of Lust and Comfort, 1995.
Photograph by Tom Brazil. By permission of Peggy Shaw and Split Britches.
in 1985, and Dress Suits possesses a similar noir tone. Holly Hughes has continued to create new solo performance pieces, such as World Without End
(1989), Clit Notes (1994), and Cat o’ Nine Tails (1996), but she is probably best
known to the general public for being one of the performance artists defunded
in 1990 by the then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, setting
off a controversy about public funding and the relation of art to its surrounding culture that continues to resonate in the work of these four artists, in the
alternative theatre world in general, and in the halls of government.
In 1991 Shaw and Weaver collaborated with the British gay company
Bloolips in one of their most popular productions, Belle Reprieve, a parody
gender-exploration of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire. Such a
joint gay and lesbian project was unusual, but Shaw had a connection with
Bloolips, having originally performed in the British troupe Hot Peaches with
Bette Bourne, Bloolips’s founder. Another gay/lesbian project followed, Lust
and Comfort (1995), with James Neale-Kennedy, of the Gay Sweatshop in
London.
Pacifist Groups
While alternative ethnic theatres were developing in the Chicano and African
American communities during the sixties, another kind of socially oriented
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alternative theatre was also rapidly expanding, much of it fueled by the New
Left’s rejection of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Probably the
best known of the many pacifist theatre companies formed during the sixties
was the Bread and Puppet Theatre, founded in 1961 by Peter Schumann, who
has remained its central driving force ever since. Although the Bread and
Puppet Theatre created many pieces directly condemning the Vietnam War
and was a key participant in the Radical Theatre Festival held in San Francisco
in 1968, its inspiration drew more upon nineteenth-century Romanticism and
early Christianity, stressing the natural goodness of man, the importance of
basic needs like bread, and the natural environment, and the corruption of
both man and nature by greed and lust for power. Schumann also rejects the
intellectual literary tradition of Western theatre, seeking to convey his
message by the simplest means – the use of cartoons and puppets, most of
these larger than life size, stories drawing upon fairy tales, myths, and the
Bible, the inevitable sharing of bread at the end of a performance. The Bread
and Puppet has often appeared in outdoor and other non-traditional spaces,
as well as in peace marches and parades, causing it to be sometimes classified
among examples of street theatre or environmental theatre. Perhaps its bestknown production, The Cry of the People for Meat (1969), illustrates many of
its concerns and strategies. A parable-like mystery play, it begins with the
joining of two twenty-foot-high puppets, Mother Earth and a vulgar Uncle Sam
representing the forces of greed and imperialism. From their union comes the
evil son Cronus, who presides over the fall of Adam and Eve, the killing of Abel,
and a whole series of Bible stories. The Virgin Mary appears as a Grey Lady, a
sorrowing mother puppet appearing in many Schumann productions. The
massacre of the innocents and the death of Jesus after the Last Supper are
accompanied by Vietnam style air raids. Other well-known pieces include The
Great Warrior (1963), A Man Says Goodbye to His Mother (1966), and Domestic
Resurrection Circus (1970). After 1974 and many tours across the United States
and to Europe, Bread and Puppet moved to a farm in Vermont where it continued to develop new productions, though less devoted to specific political
issues and more to its ongoing message of peace, environmental concerns,
and universal brotherhood.
Most of the radical alternative theatres of the sixties and early seventies
were more specifically politically focused than the Bread and Puppet. New
York’s Pageant Players, for example, like Bread and Puppet shunned traditional theatre spaces in favor of schools, parks, and streets. Their first production, The Paper Tiger Pageant in 1965, was a condemnation of imperialism
designed for presentation at peace rallies. King Con (1966) explored the evils
of giant corporate power and Laundromat (1966) utilized an approach that has
since become generally known as “invisible theatre,” the term given by the
Latin American activist director Augusto Boal to a performance that is staged
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7. Bread and Puppet Theatre in What You Possess, 1990. Photograph by Tony D’Urso.
Courtesy of Marvin Carlson.
to raise political consciousness in an audience that does not know it is watching a performance. In Laundromat the actors went to a real laundromat and
pretended to be customers, arguing among themselves about Vietnam for the
benefit of real customers, who did not presumably know that this was a
theatre piece. The Pageant Players did not make a specialty of this kind of
work, but other groups did, among them Merc Estrin’s American Playground
in Washington, which staged invisible theatre at places like the White House
and the National Archives; the Guerrilla Theater-Ensemble of Michael Doliner
at the University of Chicago in 1967; and Sandra Lowell’s staged disruptions
of office routines in Los Angeles in 1970. Pageant Players broke up at the end
of the decade, but most of its members went on to work in other alternative
political theatre, some to Oregon, some to California (to found Moving Men)
and some remaining in New York (to form the Painted Women Ritual Theatre,
the Burning City Theatre, and the Mass Transit Street Theatre).
Boston’s OM-Theatre Workshop mixed amateurs and professionals like
Bread and Puppet to explore social issues. Its director Julie Portman encouraged collective creations growing out of the group but developed with serious
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technical training, both physical and spiritual, with an emphasis on yoga exercises. Their first production, Riot in 1967, used a racially and economically
mixed cast to create a dramatic exploration of racial tensions in the Boston
community.
Guerrilla Theatre
In 1973 John Weisman published a study of guerrilla theatre in the United
States which estimated that at the height of such activity, around 1970, there
were perhaps 50 such organizations in New York and as many as 400 in the
country. Although these naturally varied greatly in organization, strategies,
and particular focus, they shared a generally leftist orientation and mobilization against the war in Vietnam, as is clear even from the name of a group like
the Haight-Ashbury Vietnam Committee, which began presenting anti-war
plays in San Francisco in 1966. The San Francisco Red Theatre, as its name
suggests, was closely associated with Marxist, particularly Maoist thought,
and with the Progressive Labor Party. They presented cartoon-like agit prop
dramas recalling the experimental leftist theatre of the thirties, with such
titles as “Lay the Bosses Off – Not the Workers.” The 1967 “Week of the Angry
Arts” in New York not only gathered anti-war artists and performers, but
inspired a number of new companies with this orientation, among them the
Sixth Street Theatre, which sought a popular audience for its political
message by utilizing masks, mime, puppets, and clown acts for shows in such
public locations as Central Park.
A similar orientation could be found in one of the main inspirations for the
spread of guerrilla theatre in the United States, the campus-based Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS). The SDS established chapters on campuses
across America during the sixties, largely in protest to Vietnam and the draft
but drawing upon a concern for workers and minorities inherited from the
Civil Rights Movement and the socialist old left. SDS developed a network of
guerrilla or street theatre organizations under the name of the Radical Arts
Troupe (RAT), which presented propagandistic skits on class conflict developed collectively. The model for RAT guerrilla theatre was developed in
California, especially on the Berkeley campus, but it soon spread to New York
City and Princeton and by 1969 there were RAT troupes on most campuses
which had a strong SDS presence. Henry Lesnick’s 1973 collection, Guerilla
Street Theatre, includes pieces not only from Berkeley and Princeton, major
centers for such activity, but also from less obvious sources, such as the
University of Buffalo and the University of Connecticut.
The term guerrilla theatre was also extended to include a wide variety of
unscripted but symbolic actions and demonstrations, contributing to what
David Mairowitz in The Radical Soap Opera, a 1974 history of leftist politics in
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America, characterized as a “Politics of Gesture.” Particularly associated with
such activities were the Yippies (a conflation of the initials for Youth
International Party and the then popular term for bohemian drop-outs from
society, hippies) such as Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin. The first Yippie
“Action,” throwing money onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in
August of 1967, was described by Hoffman as “pure theatre,” which needed no
external explanation. Similar subsequent “Actions” continued to express an
anti-capitalist, anti-war, and anti-establishment, if not directly anarchist aesthetic: dumping soot and garbage upon high officials of the Consolidated
Edison power company, for example, or appearing dressed as revolutionary
war patriots at public meetings of the House Un-American Activities
Committee.
New York as Center and the Return of the Living
Theatre
Although anti-war messages dominated much alternative political theatre of
the late sixties and early seventies, other social concerns were also important, as the ethnic theatres already mentioned demonstrate. New York in particular, the traditional center of America’s melting pot, saw alongside new
ethnic companies concerned with the problems of particular ethnic communities other alternative theatres focused upon breaking down the ghetto
walls, upon encouraging representatives of this city’s traditionally diverse
cultures to recognize and address common social and political concerns. The
New York Free Theatre, founded by Stephen Waugh in 1967, sought to gather
white, black, and Puerto Rican actors and audiences to examine common
neighborhood problems. The Soul and Latin theatre, organized in the New
York ghetto of East Harlem by Maryat Lee in 1968, sought to develop plays of
the ghetto experience to give voice to the black and Puerto Rican inhabitants.
Columbian author and director Enrique Vargas, who had presented commedia
dell’arte style popular theatre in Bogota before coming to New York, founded
the Gut Theatre for East Harlem teenagers the following year with similar
goals. Both Soul and Latin and Gut Theatre participated in the Radical Theatre
Festival in San Francisco in 1968. On the West Coast, the Inner City Repertory
Theatre, organized in Los Angeles in 1966, boasted of being the nation’s only
professional multiracial theatre company, with African American, Asian
American, Hispanic, and Native Americans freely mixed in both its productions and its administration.
The Living Theatre returned to America in the fall of 1968, surrounded by
rumors of dazzling new productions and of revolutionary contributions to the
student uprisings in France in the spring of that year. The company opened
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8. The Living Theatre in Paradise Now, c. 1968. Photography by Gianfranco Mantegna.
Used by permission of the photographer. From the Collection of the University of
California–Davis.
their American tour at Yale University, presenting four new pieces developed
in Europe: Frankenstein, Mysteries – and Smaller Pieces, Antigone, and Paradise
Now. Here and at a subsequent four-week run at New York’s Brooklyn
Academy of Music, now emerging as a center for experimental and avantgarde theatre (see Gussow’s essay above), the Living’s anarchist message and
productions aroused enormous controversy, which continued during their
cross-country tour. Many considered them still the leading edge of alternative
theatre, while others felt them outdated and self-indulgent. Conservative
audiences found their advocacy of anarchy, drugs, and nudity offensive (they
were several times arrested), while politically radical groups considered them
irrelevant and still too preoccupied with the Establishment. These reactions
shook Beck and Malina, who returned to Europe determined to renounce performing in traditional venues for Establishment audiences. The company split
into four cells, one headed by Beck and Malina, to present free theatre to the
disenfranchised. Beck and Malina’s cell spent a year in Brazil on this project
before they were arrested, imprisoned, and finally deported to the U.S. They
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continued to work outside the theatrical system, performing in industrial and
academic communities until 1974, when a grant from the Mellon Foundation
allowed them to settle for two years in Pittsburgh. Here they created two
major productions on the conditions of the workers, Six Public Acts and The
Money Tower, both performed out of doors in various symbolic locations.
After the Pittsburgh years, Beck and Malina returned again to Europe,
where they continued to perform socially committed drama for unconventional audiences and where they developed an epic collective creation combining myth and modern history, Prometheus, in 1978. In 1984 they returned
again to New York, where Julian Beck died in 1985. Judith Malina and Hanon
Reznikov (who played Prometheus) established a new home for the Living
Theatre on the Lower East Side, traditionally a poor working-class and immigrant neighborhood, where they continued to carry on the concerns of this
group by developing productions in cooperation with homeless people from
the neighborhood.
Spaces and Environments
For a variety of reasons – economic, social, and symbolic – many of the alternative political theatres since 1945 have performed in unconventional or
untraditional spaces. An important tradition of modern alternative theatre,
however, has explored the use of such spaces as a primary interest, without
necessarily having a particular political concern. From the late fifties until the
eighties such theatre was often called environmental, while in more recent
years the term “site-specific theatre” has become more popular. The nationwide civic pageantry movement in the first quarter of the century staged
large, usually outdoor spectacles in sites with strong symbolic or historical
ties to the persons or events celebrated by these productions, and a new wave
of similar spectacles was launched by Paul Green’s The Lost Colony at Manteo,
North Carolina, in 1937, reaching its peak in the fifties and sixties. This tradition of American site-related theatre, though widespread and popular, had
only a minor relationship with what came to be called environmental theatre,
whose origins, like those of most American alternative theatre, related more
to the art world and the bohemian avant-garde than to popular culture.
Richard Schechner first utilized the term “environmental theatre,” in reference to a production of Eugène Ionesco’s Victims of Duty that he directed for
the New Orleans Group in 1967. Schechner was one of the founders of the New
Orleans Group in 1965, shortly after his involvement with the Free Southern
Theatre. The new group was strongly influenced by contemporary explorations in music, painting, and performance, especially the sort of events called
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Happenings, which were at this time an important focus of theatrical experimentation. Schechner and Michael Kirby co-edited a special issue of The
Drama Review in the winter of 1965 dealing with Happenings and the theatre
of chance, and this same year Kirby also published a book on Happenings, and
Richard Kostelanetz a related study, The New American Arts. In preparing for
the special issue, Schechner and Kirby interviewed John Cage about the 1953
Black Mountain Concert and his philosophy of chance and found art, an interview that deeply influenced Schechner’s subsequent work. Schechner claims
that he took the term “environmental theatre” from Allan Kaprow, the inventor of Happenings, but used it in a somewhat different way. Kaprow always distanced himself and his work from theatre and saw Happenings as evolving not
from a performance but from an art background. According to Kaprow’s
history of the form, cubist collages began introducing non-paint materials into
painting. These works became more three-dimensional and gradually left the
canvas to exist on their own, eventually filling large spaces and creating “environments,” artistic surroundings through which spectators were free to
move. Complex environments, with human figures added, and the activities of
spectators more regulated, were, according to Kaprow, the first Happenings.
Before discussing Schechner’s environmental experimentation, it might be
well to mention the importance of The Drama Review to both the chronicling
of and inspiration for alternative theatre in America, particularly during the
years of his first editorship, from 1962 to 1969. During the sixties American
theatre entered its richest period of experimentation since the New
Stagecraft, and – as in the twenties – one journal in particular served as a sort
of clearing-house for the new ideas, seeking out, encouraging, and publicizing
new work and new artists. What Theatre Arts was to the twenties, The Drama
Review was to the sixties. TDR began in 1955 as the Carleton Drama Review,
becoming the Tulane Drama Review when its editor Robert Corrigan moved
to Tulane in 1957. It stressed new voices in the European theatre – Brecht and
Artaud, Ionesco, Genet, Ghelderode, and Betti. When Schechner became
editor in 1962 he continued for a time this literary orientation, but in 1964,
with a special issue on the Living Theatre and a double issue on Stanislavsky
in America, he began to look more at production and performance. The Spring
1965 issue contained two articles by Eugenio Barba introducing the work of
Polish experimental director Jerzy Grotowski, whose performances and theories became highly influential in the alternative American theatre of the late
sixties and seventies. During the following years, individual articles and
special numbers of TDR focused on other major issues and manifestations of
the alternative theatre scene: guerrilla theatre in summer 1966, black theatre
in summer 1968, relationships between experimental theatre and the social
sciences in the summer of 1967.
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Victims of Duty was for Schechner a preliminary experiment in environmental theatre. The entire theatre was converted into the Choubert living room,
with the audience scattered about the setting, sometimes directly addressed
by the actors and never able to see and hear the entire production because of
sight lines and overlapping scenes. These concerns – audience participation,
multiple focus, a total performance environment surrounding actors and audience, and the mixing of art and life – were further developed by Schechner
with The Performance Group, which he founded in New York in 1967. The bestknown work of this group was Dionysus in ’69, a collective creation growing
out of Euripides’ The Bacchae, staged in a setting designed by Michael Kirby
and Schechner’s designer from New Orleans, Jerry Rojo, consisting of an open
central space surrounded by open scaffold towers, some as high as five
stories, for the spectators. Inspired by Grotowski, then giving workshops at
New York University, Schechner emphasized physical action, audience
involvement, and actor vulnerability. The total nudity in its orgiastic scenes
gave this production a particular notoriety even in the free-wheeling late
sixties.
Makbeth (1969), the Group’s next production, put more emphasis on
diverse audience experience, with multiple scenes from Shakespeare being
played simultaneously in an environment which allowed audiences to circulate freely and select their focus. Commune (1970) had no basic text, but
began with two recent events of horror, the My Lai massacre by American soldiers in Vietnam and the murder of film actress Sharon Tate and her friends
by members of the Charles Manson commune, and developed improvisations
relating these two events to each other and to themes of domination and violence in American history, literary works, the Bible, folk songs, and spirituals.
This production was the first involving Elizabeth LeCompte (as assistant
director) and Spalding Gray (as an actor), new members who had joined
Schechner as a result of their enthusiasm over Dionysus in ’69.
During the seventies the group continued to explore audience–stage relationships but in a less radical way and with generally more conventional
scripts, such as Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime in 1972 and Brecht’s Mother
Courage in 1974. Their last production was Genet’s The Balcony in 1979.
Certain members of the company, particularly LeCompte and Gray, were interested in taking it in different directions from those which engaged Schechner.
The Group disbanded in 1980, but Gray, LeCompte, and several other former
members of it formed a new company that continued to perform in the same
space, the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in New York’s Soho district.
From the street they took the name the Wooster Group, and under this name
became one of America’s leading alternative theatres during the eighties and
nineties.
In 1972 Christopher Hardman, who had worked with Peter Schumann of the
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Bread and Puppet Theatre, joined Laura Farabough to form The Beggar’s
Theatre, which utilized the sculptural qualities of Bread and Puppet to create
visual spectacles in California that at first suggested social concerns like
those of Bread and Puppet, but gradually became more centered on the interplay of the visual elements, often drawn from everyday events and characters,
with their environments, usually out of doors. Partly responsible for this shift
were Lary Graber and his wife Evelyn Lewis, a composer and dancer with a
strong interest in Asian theatre, who joined Hardman and Farabough in 1977,
when the venture was renamed Snake Theatre. The found environments of
their productions included spectacular natural settings, such as the beachfront Marin headlands near San Francisco for Somewhere in the Pacific (1978),
and evocative man-made ones, such as an abandoned gas station in Sausalito,
California, for Auto (1979). After the death of Graber in 1980, Hardman and
Farabough formed two separate companies, Antenna and Nightfire.
During the eighties site-specific theatre organizations appeared across the
United States. The Vermont Ensemble Theatre, organized as an environmental theatre company in 1984, presented a widely reviewed production of
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in 1986 with each act presented in a different
church or hall around the village green of Middlebury, Vermont, and with
staged outdoor vignettes of village life presented to the spectators as they
strolled by lantern light from one building to another. Vidlak’s Family Café, a
functioning diner in Omaha, Nebraska, presented during the mid-eighties a
whole series of plays written to be given in the diner, with actors (many of
them carried through several of the plays) mixing with the regular patrons of
the diner. This was not, however, an example of “invisible theatre,” but was
known and accepted by the audience as a regular, if unconventional, theatrical performance.
Probably the best-known West Coast example of such theatre was the
multimedia spectacles of Lin Hixon, performed with huge casts and crews in
the Los Angeles area. Her 1984 Hey John, Did You Take the Camino Far? occupied the loading dock of a downtown industrial building, but its song and
dance numbers and its teenage gangs and their cars spilled out into the adjacent public streets with no clear division between the performance and the
city beyond.
En Garde Arts
In New York, En Garde Arts, devoted to site-specific theatre, was founded in
1985 by Anne Hamburger, and became not only an important producing organization in its own right, but a venue for some of the most innovative alternative theatre artists of the period. The first En Garde Arts production to attract
wide attention was At the Chelsea in 1988. Several rooms in the Chelsea Hotel,
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a famous New York architectural and literary landmark, were converted into
small spaces for performances and tableaux which audiences could sample
as they wished. Various actors, performance artists, and avant-garde artists
and composers contributed to this program. One room was devoted to a postmodern version of the popular American TV series A Little House on the
Prairie, with the youngest sister played by a hay-chomping goat. This was the
contribution of the Squat Theatre, a well-known New York experimental
company that had made its home nearby on Twenty-third Street from 1977,
when they emigrated from Hungary, until 1985.
Squat Theatre shared certain central concerns of environmental theatre,
particularly the exploration of the permeable boundary between reality and
theatrical presentation. Although they constantly experimented with a wide
variety of media and framing devices, they were best known for a basic configuration used in most of their Twenty-third Street productions. The audience entered a space originally designed as a shop and was seated at the back
of the shop facing the street. The large shopfront window could be curtained
off, but it was freqently left open. Performances took place primarily between
audience and window, and although the performers themselves sometimes
mixed with the street life outside, the unrehearsed reactions of passers-by
and the normal passing life of the street provided the major use of this perspective and a part of the theatre’s aesthetic. The occasional nudity in the
productions naturally caused particular surprise and occasional protest from
passers-by, and in 1978 the mayor’s office officially investigated the company
following complaints about a nude woman cooking in the window during the
production of Andy Warhol’s Last Love. The Midtown Enforcement Project,
however, found Squat a “serious group of artists” engaged in “radical avantgarde theatre,” and no charges were filed.
One of En Garde Arts’ most ambitious productions took place in 1990, and
introduced New York audiences to the work of Iranian-born Reza Abdoh of Los
Angeles, who before his death in 1995 (at the age of thirty), was widely considered one of the most innovative and imaginative avant-garde American
directors. In California Abdoh assembled a company with whom most of his
works were created, but these fragmented, multilayered, multimedia creations, full of pop culture references and Artaudian extremity, were all his own
creations. Abdoh was invited to New York by En Garde Arts after his breakthrough production, Minamata, a sprawling, epic dance-theatre work dealing
with the mercury poisoning of Japanese fishermen, caused a sensation on the
West Coast. For En Garde, Abdoh created Father Was a Peculiar Man, loosely
based on Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This production employed
sixty actors and was staged in various locations over a four-block area of New
York’s meatpacking district. Some scenes mixed audience and actors in settings taking up entire blocks, others placed the audience on bleachers to
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9. En Garde Arts’ production of The Trojan Women a Love Story (1996) by Charles L.
Mee, Jr. Directed by Tina Landau, the production was performed in the ruins of the
East River Park Amphitheatre. Pictured are Stephen Webber and Nancy Hume.
Photograph by William Rivelli. Courtesy of En Garde Arts.
observe large open theatricalized vistas, still others allowed audience
members to wander on their own through the dim recesses of an abandoned
packing house, to witness intimate tableaux of torture and ecstasy.
Abdoh returned to the West Coast for his next spectacle, an epic parody in
Spanish of television novels, Pasos en la Obscuridad, for Peter Sellars’s international celebration of multiculturalism in Los Angeles. Abdoh then
embarked on his most ambitious project, a trilogy meditation on violence and
ecstacy in contemporary America consisting of The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice,
Bogeyman, and The Law of Remains. The Los Angeles Theatre Center was to
premiere these works, but it went bankrupt before the third, and Abdoh’s
company, Dar A Luz, presented this instead in New York, in an abandoned
hotel, where it was the sensation of the 1992–93 season, compared by some
critics in its power and originality to the seminal works of the Living Theatre.
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Tight, Right, White (1993) and Quotations from a Ruined City (1994) were the
final works in Abdoh’s tragically brief career.
The next major En Garde Arts production after Father Was a Peculiar Man
was Charles Mee’s Another Person is a Foreign Country (1991), directed by
Anne Bogart, who had gained a reputation during the eighties for her environmental productions, often with strong political overtones, in university and
experimental theatres in America and Europe. Another Person, dealing with
disabled or “different” persons, was given at the Towers, an abandoned and
ruined former hospital and nursing home on Central Park. In 1994 Bogart
directed in New York’s Masonic Ballroom for En Garde Arts her own Marathon
Dancing, part of a trilogy she created on American popular entertainment. In
1996 she directed Juliana Francis, the leading actress for Reza Abdoh, in a onewoman multimedia production, Go Go Go.
Another director featured by En Garde Arts in the nineties was Tina
Landau, who had a strong interest in the work of Abdoh. In 1993 she staged
for En Garde Charles L. Mee’s Orestes, a nightmarish reworking of Euripides,
on the ruins of two giant piers in the Hudson River, and in 1994 her own
Stonewall, also on the Hudson, a carnival musical meditation on Greenwich
Village in 1969.
Robert Wilson
Although political and social concerns continued to contribute significantly
to American alternative theatre after the peak of interest in such concerns in
the late sixties and early seventies, a number of important new artists and
groups focused more upon formal and structural concerns, creating a more
abstract theatre with artistic connections to minimalism in the visual arts,
certain trends in modern and postmodern dance, and the concerns of the
creators of events like the happenings. The best known of these formalist
theatre artists is Robert Wilson, who began his career as a painter and architect (though with some theatre activities, including designing the larger-thanlife-size puppets for Van Itallie’s America Hurrah) and whose major works,
both large and small, have always strongly reflected this visual orientation.
Wilson’s first productions, in 1965, were essentially modern dance pieces, but
he was not interested in working with professional performers. Instead he saw
performance as a means to allow all people to develop their potential, and he
worked by preference with untrained and handicapped persons, a central
interest of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, which he founded to carry on
his work in 1969. The same year he presented in New York The King of Spain,
which like the dance experiments of Ann Halprin encouraged the performers
to do everyday activities in a non-theatrical manner.
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Wilson became interested in focusing upon the perception of experience,
and began utilizing extreme slow motion to induce a kind of dream state of
heightened awareness. He also began combining smaller pieces into larger
and more complex ones, so that his productions of the early seventies grew
to lengths rivaling the classic dance spectacles of Asia. The King of Spain
became the second act of The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, which in turn
became the first three acts of Deafman Glance, a spectacle that lasted eight
hours, even before Wilson added to it a three-hour prologue. The Life and
Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), including parts of each of these previous productions, ran for twelve hours.
Sigmund Freud was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1969,
and it gained Wilson his first wide attention. Many critics were puzzled by the
work, but Richard Foreman, who was just beginning his own influential career
in the American alternative theatre, wrote a prophetic review of Wilson’s work
in the Village Voice, calling the work a masterpiece of artist’s theatre and
noting that Wilson was one of the few theatre artists beginning to apply to
theatre a new aesthetic, that of many contemporary painters, musicians,
dancers, and filmmakers, who created non-manipulative works in which an
audience member could explore his or her own perceptions.
Deafman Glance premiered at the University of Iowa in 1970 and was presented at the Brooklyn Academy the following year. It was inspired by
Raymond Andrews, an adolescent deaf-mute whom Wilson befriended and
who played the leading role in this production. Not a sound occured in this
collage-epic, which on one level suggested the fantasy world of a child like
Andrews and on another a Western collective unconscious with a dazzling
array of images drawn from literature and legend, religion and folklore, high
art and popular culture.
After his largest undertaking, the 168-hour epic KA MOUNTAIN, staged in
Iran for a festival organized by the Shah, Wilson returned to the Brooklyn
Academy for the relatively modest twelve-hour Joseph Stalin, incorporating
material from many of his earlier works and providing a kind of summation of
the first phase of his work, which his chronicler Stefan Brecht has called the
“theatre of visions” period (The Theatre of Visions, 267). During the mid-seventies, Brecht suggested, Wilson did not give up an image-based theatre, but
became occupied as well with an assault on discursive language. The opening
work in this phase, A Letter for Queen Victoria, was Wilson’s only Broadway
production. Much of its language was derived from Christopher Knowles, a
gifted but autistic child who, like Raymond Andrews, provided Wilson with a
pathway into another mode of perception. Knowles and Wilson’s grandmother had major roles in this production, which offered a kind of apocalyptic deconstruction of both language and history.
Knowles continued to be an inspiration for Wilson and appeared as an
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actor with him in the 1975 The $ Value of Man at the Brooklyn Academy and
in two small 1980 plays, Dialogue and Curious George, but the prolific Wilson
was exploring other directions as well. In 1977 he appeared with Lucinda
Childs in an abstract piece I Was Sitting on My Patio this Guy Appeared I Thought
I Was Hallucinating. Childs was one of a group of dancers, including Simone
Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and David Gordon, who
under the inspiration of Cage, Cunningham, and the early Happenings, began
during the sixties to collaborate with experimental artists like Robert
Rauschenberg and Robert Morris to incoporate everyday material and
objects into their work. A center for this work in the sixties was the Judson
Church, where Childs appeared in Morris’s multimedia meditation on
Muybridge action photos, Waterman Switch, in 1965. In the early seventies
Childs, Brown, and others choreographed works by first working out abstract
geometrical patterns on paper, somewhat in the manner of a Cage composition. Such was the working method of the 1975 works Locus by Brown and
Congeries on Edges for 20 Obliques by Childs.
After Patio, Wilson collaborated with Childs and with avant-garde composer Philip Glass on a much larger work, the five-hour opera, Einstein on the
Beach, which was toured widely in Europe before being presented at the
Metropolitan Opera in 1976 and revived in 1984 at the Brooklyn Academy.
Einstein is perhaps the best known of Wilson’s works and in many ways typical
of them – a sequence of striking visual and aural images replace traditional
narrative, the only form an abstract mathematical configuration, here based
on repeating triads. An even more ambitious work was undertaken by Wilson
for performance at the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984, another twelve-hour
piece, this one called the CIVIL warS. Wilson had now become at least as well
known in Europe as in America, and pieces of the new work were developed
there and in Tokyo to be assembled in Los Angeles. The text was created by
Heiner Müller, the leading German experimental theatre writer of this generation. Funding for the Los Angeles production fell through, and so American
audiences were able only to see a touring production of the “knee plays” –
short pieces Wilson created as interludes between the major sections of the
work – and the Cologne section, which was revived at the Brooklyn Academy.
Wilson continued to work with Müller texts, producing his Hamletmachine
with students from New York University in 1986 and his Quartett at the
American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge in 1988. The ART has become one
of Wilson’s favored venues in America, offering his first staging of a classic,
Alcestis, in 1986, and his version of Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken,
in 1992. The Brooklyn Academy has continued to stage most of the larger
Wilson works done in America, The Forest (based on the Babylonian
Gilgamesh epic) in 1988, The Black Rider (with text by William Burroughs,
based on Weber’s romantic opera, Der Freischütz) in 1993, and Alice (based on
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10. The interior of the spaceship in Robert Wilson’s and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the
Beach, 1976. Photograph: copyright (©) 1976 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved.
Alice in Wonderland) in 1995, though Wilson did return to his home state of
Texas to direct Büchner’s Danton’s Death at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1992.
More recently, Wilson has presented smaller works as part of the Lincoln
Center Serious Fun Festival, an important summer program of experimental
work. Here he did his own monologue version of Hamlet in 1995 and two stagings of Gertrude Stein works, Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights in 1992 and Four
Saints in Three Acts in 1996.
Richard Foreman
Richard Foreman, an early champion of Wilson, has, like Wilson, been a leader
in structural, imagistic alternative theatre in America ever since the late
sixties. Foreman has cited Gertrude Stein as an important influence on his
work, and like Stein he has been particularly interested in the phenomenology of performance, urging the audience to consider the experience itself and
the operations of the mind on that experience rather than follow some discursive narrative. To this end he founded what he called the Ontological-Hysteric
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Theatre in 1968. Foreman’s early works focused strongly upon phenomenology, placing an object or actor on stage and considering ways of looking at
this. Sequences were interrupted by sharp noises, by the appearance of signs
commenting on the situation or providing reception suggestions, or by similar
miked comments from Foreman himself. Tempo was manipulated, sometimes
resulting in extreme slow-motion that suggested the rhythms of Wilson.
According to Foreman, his first works, Angelface (1968), Ida-Eyed (1969) and
Total Recall (1970), dealt directly with objects, seeking to expose their
essence. With Hotel China (1971) he became more interested in the effect of
objects upon audiences and how objects might be manipulated by the desire
of the performer. Fantasy and surrealistic effects began to enter the work, like
an airborne house in Hotel China. In Sophia=Wisdom, Part 3 the miked voice of
Foreman himself began to be added to the already common signs as another
level of commentary, and soon after, the taped voice of actors added another
level still. In The Book of Splendors, Part Two (1976), Kate Manheim carried on
conversations with her own taped voice, which gave lines that usually seemed
to be not her own thoughts but those of Foreman. This separation of voice or
image from actor by the use of projected images or miked sound has become
a common feature not only in the work of Foreman, but in many of the leading
alternative theatre artists of the seventies, among them Laurie Anderson,
Mabou Mines, and the Wooster Group.
Foreman has credited much of the playfulness and fantasy in his early work
to Kate Manheim, who for many years was a leading character in his plays. In
the early plays the same names repeatedly appear – Ben, Sophia, Max, Karl,
Rhoda – though they are not characters in a conventional sense since they
merely exist in Foreman’s surrealistic environment, without backgrounds or
coherent and ongoing goals or desires. Although a four-play “sequence,”
Sophia=Wisdom, Parts 1–4 (1971–74) featured that “character,” Manheim
(Rhoda) had by Rhoda in Potatoland (Her Fall-Starts) (1974) moved to a central
position in the group. Manheim was also interested in the shock and playful
possibilities of performing in the nude, and included nude scenes in most of
the works of this period, adding to their provocative quality.
With Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation (1975) Foreman began to
move away from his preoccupation with the manipulation of objects toward
the manipulation of thought processes, assembling his new works from fragments taken out of jottings in his own notebooks, thoughts triggered by his
wide-ranging reading, often in philosophic works. In the late seventies
Foreman gave up the loft in Soho which had been his theatre and began
appearing in a range of other locations, first with Joseph Papp’s Public
Theater, which presented several of his works beginning with Penguin Touquet
in 1981. In 1985 he collaborated with the Wooster Group to present Miss
Universal Happiness, which Foreman saw as the end of another period in his
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11. Richard Foreman’s Rhoda in Potatoland, 1974. Photograph courtesy of Richard
Foreman. Photograph: copyright (©) 1975 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction
reserved.
work, one that pushed toward a kind of Dionysian frenzy. His next work, The
Cure (1986), began moving in a more contemplative direction, seeking within
himself and his work mythic and archetypical resonances, a direction that
may be traced through his more recent work such as What Did He See? (1988),
Eddy Goes to Poetry City (1991), Samuel’s Major Problems (1993), and The
Universe (1996). For Foreman, Wilson, and others discussed in this chapter,
see also chapter 5, “Directors and Direction.”
Michael Kirby, one of the major chroniclers and theorists of happenings and
the turn toward formalism that he called “the new theatre,” created what he
called The Structuralist Workshop in New York where, in such productions as
Photoanalysis (1976) and Double Gothic (1978), he assembled narrative fragments, sounds, and images in formal patterns that he hoped would approximate the experience of a musical composition, with interpretation, if any, left
to the subjective experience of the audience.
Other artists on both coasts during the seventies continued like Kirby to
apply the abstract and non-objective strategies of such phenomena as events,
environments, and happenings to the creation of highly formal theatrical
expressions. One center of such activity was San Francisco, where most such
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productions developed not out of theatre, but out of related arts. In the early
seventies dancer Suzanne Hellmuth began working with sculptor Jock
Reynolds. Their first major collaboration, Hospital (1977), presented a collage
of sounds, images, props, and tasks assembled from lengthy observations of
activities in a San Francisco hospital. Similarly, extended observations of the
life in San Francisco Bay provided the raw material for their 1979 spectacle
Navigation. Rather closer to the approach of Wilson in his intuitive assembling
of sounds, shapes, and colors is Alan Finneran, a San Francisco sculptor who
in 1972 formed Soon 3, for the production of “performance landscapes,”
involving moving scupture, lighting, sound, and projections. Living persons
were added as compositional elements to his 1975 Desire Circus, and in Black
Water Echo (1977) such persons began moving elements about, in the first of
what Finneran called “task activated landscapes.” Subsequent productions –
A Wall in Venice/3 Women/Wet Shadows (1978), Tropical Proxy (1979), and The
Man in the Nile at Night (1980) – became increasingly elaborate in their use of
movement, costume, fictional references, and finally scraps of language, but
these did not move the performances closer to traditional linear and narrative drama. The new elements remained parts of a formal structure, as they
are in the work of Foreman.
Meredith Monk
Clearly the formalist alternative theatre significantly overlaps many of the
concerns of other art forms, particularly those of the modern visual arts and
modern dance. The line between certain aspects of modern alternative
theatre and of modern dance is especially fluid and certain major artists of the
period since the late sixties have been equally claimed by the worlds of dance
and of theatre (though the useful term dance-theatre has never become as
well established as Tanztheater has in Germany). One of the best known of
such artists is Meredith Monk – composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer,
and director. During the mid-sixties Monk was a choreographer and performer
at the legendary Judson Dance Theatre, working with Lucinda Childs and
others there, but in 1968 she formed her own company, The House, devoted
to the crossing of traditional artistic boundaries. She has since carried out
more than one hundred interdisciplinary projects. Monk was a pioneer in sitespecific performance, creating one of the earliest examples of such work,
Juice (1969), consisting of three parts performed (with “intermissions” of a
week or more) in three different locations, beginning at the Guggenheim
Museum and ending in Monk’s loft in Soho, and one of the most ambitious,
American Archeology #1, in several sites on Roosevelt Island in 1994 for a New
York based site-specific dance-producing organization, Dancing in the Streets,
created in 1984 by Elise Bernhardt.
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Monk first achieved wide attention with two choreographed epics, Vessel
(1971), based on material from the life of Joan of Arc, and Quarry (1976), suggesting the devastation of World War II as seen through the images of a feverish child. Movement and dance have always been an important component of
Monk’s productions, and were central to many of them, as in one of her bestknown creations, Education of a Girl-Child, premiered in 1973 and revived in
1979 and 1993. This famous work ended with a forty-five-minute solo dance by
Monk, a tour de force depiction of the stages in a woman’s life running backward from extreme old age to childhood. In addition to many smaller compositions and to films and videos, Monk created two more epic dance-theatre
pieces in the early eighties, Speciman Days (1981), drawing on images from
Walt Whitman and the American Civil War, and The Games, an exploration of
a post-nuclear landscape that she developed in collaboration with Ping
Chong. Many of Monk’s works integrate film with live movement, from the
early 16 Millimeter Earrings (1966) to the solo work Volcano Songs (1990), but
perhaps her most original experimentation has been with the exploration of
the expressive range and potential of the human voice, a particular concern
of the Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble, which she founded in 1978. A
major expression of this concern was ATLAS: an opera in three parts (1991).
More recently the Vocal Ensemble presented a non-narrative oratorio, The
Politics of Quiet (1996), at the Brooklyn Academy.
Ping Chong
Ping Chong was a member of Mededith Monk’s company from 1971 to 1978,
but he produced his own first work, Lazarus, as early as 1972 and formed his
own company, the Fiji Theatre Company (later the Ping Chong Company) in
1975. He shares Monk’s interests in site-specific and multimedia work, but
with his own visual vocabulary and rhythm. His environmental installations
have been created in Canada and Europe and in 1988 he developed a triad of
site-specific installations called Plage Concerte for the Three Rivers Arts
Festival in Pittsburgh. Approximately one-third of his more than thirty productions, including Skiing: A State of Being (1988) and Brightness (1989), have
been offered at La MaMa ETC, one of New York’s leading venues for experimental theatre since its founding by Ellen Stewart in 1961. Ping Chong derives
his material from a wide range of sources – literary, artistic, historical, philosophical, and artistic. His high-tech interests took him in the mid-eighties into
the domain of science fiction in such works as The Angels of Swedenborg
(1985) at the Brooklyn Academy. More recently, he has turned his attention to
explorations of East–West relationships in Deshima (premiered in Holland
in 1990 and first given in America at La MaMa in 1993), and Chinoiserie, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy in 1995.
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Martha Clarke
Martha Clarke emerged in the mid-eighties as another leader in the creation
of dance-theatre, her work grouped by reviewers with that of Robert Wilson,
Ping Chong, Mabou Mines, and such European visual artists as Tadeusz
Kantor of Poland and Peter Brook of France. Clarke was co-founder of the
Pilobolus dance company in 1972. Pilobolus is best known for abstract gymnastic work, but Clarke was more interested in compositions utilizing images
from the European painterly and literary tradition like the 1974 Monkshood’s
Farewell, based on medieval illuminations. She left Pilobolus in 1979 and
began exploring dance-theatre, achieving her first success in this form with A
Metamorphosis in Miniature (1982), based on the Kafka story. The two works
that established her reputation were The Garden of Earthly Delights (1984,
revived 1987), inspired by the hallucinatory landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch
and the peasants of Pieter Brueghel, and Vienna Lusthaus (1986), inspired by
the works of Egon Schiele and other artists of turn-of-the-century Vienna.
Clarke returned to Kafka for her 1987 The Hunger Artist, woven from Kafka’s
writings and the biography, and including both sung and spoken material.
This excursion into spoken theatre was not well received, however, and
Clarke returned to visual and sung material for her 1988 Miracolo d’Amore,
with images based on Tiepolo’s Punchinello drawings and with a
Monteverdian score by Richard Peaslee, a frequent collaborator with Clarke.
One of Clarke’s most ambitious productions was the 1990 Endangered Species
at the Brooklyn Academy, which drew upon the circus pastels of ToulouseLautrec and evocations of the American Civil War and the Holocaust and
included a number of live animals. Critical response to this work was highly
negative, which may have encouraged Clarke to turn away from the creation
of new works to apply her powerful visual imagination to traditional opera, in
such productions as The Magic Flute in 1992 and Così fan tutte in 1993 at the
Glimmerglass Summer Opera in upstate New York.
Laurie Anderson
Most of the alternative theatre multimedia formalists have drawn their public
largely from those interested in contemporary experimental art and performance, even Robert Wilson, who is surely the most prominent of those so far
discussed. One artist working in this general area has, however, enjoyed a
more popular success and visibility. This is Laurie Anderson, particularly with
United States (1983), a seven-hour “performance portrait of the country”
which attracted a total audience of over 85,000 to a multimedia production
including stories, songs, slide projections, film, and even a percussion solo
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played on Anderson’s amplified skull. Anderson began her career doing smallscale multimedia productions based on autobiographical material such as the
1977 For Instances, often at The Kitchen, another important home for experimental performance in New York, but she was inspired by Wilson and Glass’s
Einstein on the Beach to undertake the more elaborate spectacles that, supported by the great recording success she enjoyed with such songs as
“Superman,” established her reputation.
During the eighties and nineties Anderson contributed to the alternative
theatre both as a composer for the work of other avant-garde directors (creating for example the music for Robert Wilson’s staging of Alcestis in 1986) and
as creator of her own new productions exploring political and social concerns
of contemporary society, Empty Places (1989), a solo piece, and The Nerve
Bible (1993), with Anderson as the leading performer.
The Wooster Group and Mabou Mines
Two groups have been most prominent in what some have called the “second
wave” of Off-Off Broadway experimentation, appearing in the late sixties and
early seventies (the first wave having been launched by the Living and Open
theatres). These are the Wooster Group and Mabou Mines. The Wooster
Group collectively created their first work, Sakonnet Point, in 1974. Like subsequent Wooster Group pieces, and unlike the Performance Group creations,
Sakonnet Point had no coherent narrative, but was woven out of a collection
of “found” material contributed by the performers – specific physical objects,
autobiographical fragments from Spalding Gray, scraps of text, bits of movement and action.
Among the influences on the developing aesthetic of the Wooster Group
Elizabeth LeCompte has cited Robert Wilson’s work, especially Deafman
Glance, with its emphasis on non-linear but geometric form and the visual,
and that of Richard Foreman, especially Pain(t), which suggested ways of suggesting human actions abstractly. LeCompte was also interested in the dance
works of Meredith Monk, especially Education of a Girl-Child, and in the oneman performances of Stuart Sherman, who created strange and powerful dramatic effects by manipulating found everyday objects rather in the manner of
puppets.
Sakonnet Point became the first work in a trilogy, including Rumstick Road
(1977) and Nayatt School (1979), all beginning with autobiographical material
from Gray but rapidly expanding to include material from popular and classical recordings, spoken records, taped telephone conversations (causing a
controversy of this use of “private” material), slides and films, and a strange
assortment of physical objects. The final piece also included the first
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extended autobiographical monologue by Gray, a form that would eventually
become his favored means of expression, and sections from T. S. Eliot’s The
Cocktail Party, the Wooster Group’s first “recycling” of a traditional dramatic
text. Point Judith (1979) served as a kind of epilogue to this cycle, to the first
phase of the Group’s work, and to the centrality of Gray. During these years
other key members were added to the Group, first Ron Vawter, who soon
became a leading actor for the Group, then Libby Howes, who took leading
female parts until her departure in 1981. Kate Valk, who arrived in 1979, filled
in for her and soon became the Group’s new leading woman. Willem Dafoe,
the other best-known member of the group, joined in 1977, having previously
worked with Theatre X, an experimental group in Milwaukee. The Group’s
designer and technical director, Jim Clayburgh, has created a unique visual
look for Wooster Group performances – partly environmental, partly presentational, partly rough-edged and industrial, partly negotiated by media, and
invariably recycling physical material from earlier productions, just as the
performances continually recycle and rearrange material from the performers’ lives, their previous work, and the surrounding culture.
Gray’s autobiographical monologue that began Nayatt School may be taken
as the first of a continuing series of such monologues that he has created since
1979. These in their totality have amounted to a kind of performance autobiography, beginning with Terrors of Pleasure, Sex and Death to the Age of 14
(1979) and catching up to the writing of the work being performed in Monster
in a Box (1988). The best known of this series was Swimming to Cambodia
(1984), a reflection on a wide variety of contemporary concerns inspired by
Gray’s work on the film The Killing Fields.
As Gray moved into his own performance career, the Wooster Group began
a second “trilogy,” The Road to Immortality, turning to more general cultural
explorations, but still exploring collage constructions of found and improvised material. The first two parts of this trilogy proved highly controversial,
due to some of the “found” material incorporated, blackface routines in Route
1 & 9 (1981) which many found racially offensive, and borrowings from Arthur
Miller’s The Crucible in L.S.D. (. . .Just the High Points. . .) (1985), inspiring a
threatened lawsuit from Miller until the material was rewritten. The third
work, Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony (1989) aroused less controversy, but was no less complex in its weaving together of sources, which
included material from Lenny Bruce, Gustave Flaubert, and Ingmar Bergman.
During the nineties the group gradually moved toward the presentation of
more conventional dramatic texts, though always with the high-tech yet
rough-edged, non-realistic style unique to this company. As an “epilogue” to
their second trilogy they offered Brace Up! (1990), their first work to follow
closely the narrative frame of a traditional play, here Chekhov’s Three Sisters,
though filtered through an electronic web of film, video, and miked passages
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12. The Wooster Group in The Road to Immortality: Part Two (. . . Just the High Points . . .),
1985. Pictured (left to right, seated at table): Peyton Smith, Jeff Webster, Norman
Frisch; (left to right, in front): Ron Vawter, Kate Valk, Willem Dafoe. Photograph by Bob
van Dantzig. Courtesy of Anne Reiss and The Wooster Group.
and with a permeating overlay of reference to Japanese performance traditions. During the early nineties, the Wooster Group developed two productions, Fish Story 1 and 2, which began with material from Brace Up! and
gradually shifted to material focused on Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones.
O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, which followed, was developed during much of 1995,
and was the Group’s most faithful adaptation to date of a traditional dramatic
text, though unquestionably reinvigorated by the Group’s distinctive style.
After the departure of Spalding Gray, the Wooster Group has remained
fairly cohesive as an ensemble, even though certain of its members also
appeared in films or in other performances, as did Ron Vawter (who died in
1994), with his acclaimed one-man recreation of “performances” by recent
homosexual men, one open and the other closeted, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, in
1992.
The other best-known alternative theatre company during the eighties,
Mabou Mines, was much looser in its organization, with important members
sometimes alone, sometimes in varying combinations, pursuing careers that
took them in a variety of different directions. The roots of Mabou Mines are in
San Francisco, where in the early sixties director/playwright Lee Breuer
worked with actress Ruth Maleczech, who had worked earlier with the San
Francisco Mime Troupe. In 1965 Breuer and Maleczech went to Paris, where
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they lived with San Francisco friends JoAnne Akalaitis and composer Philip
Glass (later a frequent collaborator with Robert Wilson and other experimental directors and choreographers), and there they met actor David Warrilow.
In 1970 these five artists settled in New York, and began creating pieces
based on their exposure to theatre in California and Europe and weaving
together popular culture, film, and the emotional autobiography of Breuer,
whose psyche provided raw material for this group as Spalding Gray did for
the Wooster Group. This was most clearly seen in the early psychic biographical explorations Breuer called “animations,” The Red Horse Animation (1970),
B. Beaver Animation (1975), and The Shaggy Dog Animation (1978), all premiered at art museums rather than theatres. The group established itself in
theatre work, however, with a highly praised trilogy of three short works by
Beckett at the Theater for the New City in 1975. During the late seventies
David Warrilow left Mabou Mines (though he appeared with Ruth Maleczech
in 1987 at the Brooklyn Academy in a production of Zangezi by the Russian
avant-gardist Velimer Khlebnikov), while actors Bill Raymond and Fred
Neumann joined the company. JoAnne Akalaitis also emerged as a major
director during this period, with her imagistic productions of Beckett’s
Cascando (1975), the evocation of French novelist Colette, Dressed Like an Egg
(1977), and a pop culture view of the atomic threat, Dead-End Kids (1980).
During the eighties the reputation of Mabou Mines steadily grew, even as its
various members also pursued careers outside the group. For the group
JoAnne Akalaitis directed Through the Leaves by the German neo-naturalist
Franz Xaver Kroetz in 1984, but her major work was now at other theatres. She
and Glass offered a major production at the Brooklyn Academy, The
Photographer, in 1983, and they worked together also on a controversial
Endgame at the American Repertory Theatre in 1984, publicly renounced by
Samuel Beckett. At the Minneapolis Guthrie Theater she directed Georg
Büchner’s Leonce and Lena in 1987 and Jean Genet’s The Screens in 1989. That
same year she presented her first Shakespeare, a controversial Victorian
gothic version of Cymbeline at the New York Public Theater. In 1991 she presented Henry IV there and, much to the surprise of New York’s theatre world,
was named as his successor by Joseph Papp, the founder of this major OffBroadway cultural establishment. Akalaitis’s own productions during her brief
directorship, Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Büchner’s Woyzeck (both 1992)
were well received, but her administration of the theatre drew critical attack
and she was asked by the trustees to resign in 1993. Since then she has returned
to freelance directing, sometimes with former Mabou Mines colleagues, as in
the stage adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel, Prisoner of Love (1995), made into
a one-woman show for Ruth Maleczech with music by Philip Glass.
Mabou Mines’ Prologue to Death in Venice (1979), directed by Breuer, featured music by Bob Telson and a Japanese Bunraku puppet manipulated
by actor Bill Raymond. After this, much of Breuer’s work used intercultural
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13. Mabou Mines’ production of Epidog, 1996. Courtesy of Ruth Maleczech. Photography by © Beatriz Schiller 1998.
elements – African and Caribbean music, Japanese and Southeast Asian
puppets. His best-known production was a Sophoclean adaptation, The
Gospel at Colonus (1983), set to a gospel score by Bob Telson and performed
in New York, Washington, and San Francisco. This same year Bill Raymond
directed for Mabou Mines an anti-war meditation based on the career of
Ulysses Grant, Cold Harbor, but he remained primarily an actor, for this group
and for other experimental directors such as Richard Foreman and Joe
Chaikin.
Mabou Mines’ most ambitious undertaking was the 1990 Lear, placed in a
Southern U.S. setting and with most of the roles gender-reversed. Breuer
directed and Lear was played by Ruth Maleczech. Maleczech directed her
own musical theatre piece, Suenos, based on the poems of a seventeenthcentury nun, in 1989, but she was steadily becoming recognized as one of the
leading actresses of the New York experimental scene, frequently used by
Breuer and Akalaitis, but increasingly by other directors as well. She often
appeared with Fred Neumann, most notably in the continuing autobiographical multicultural epic Animation, which involves much of Breuer’s work since
the mid-seventies and which, if staged in its entirety, would last ten to twelve
days. The most ambitious element in this epic was The Warrior Ant, presented
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at the Brooklyn Academy in 1988, with Carribean-based music by Telson and
starring a Bunraku puppet. The closely related but much more intimate
MahabharANTa (1992) was staged as a Balinese shadow play, with Maleczech
and Neumann as narrators and with puppets by a Balinese puppet master, I
Wayan Wija. Maleczech and Neumann also appeared as narrators in the next
section of Breuer’s ongoing epic, the more elaborate Epidog (1996), which
freely mixed living actors, puppets and projections.
Performance Art
In addition to the work of these experimental companies and directors, the
1980s also saw the rise in America of another type of alternative theatre,
usually designated as performance or performance art. In the early seventies
a group of artists around San Francisco began experimenting with primarily
solo actions related to Happenings and involved with the workings of the
body. These came to be known as “body art” or “life art,” and they ranged from
the framing of everyday activity to such extreme actions as Chris Burden’s
Shoot (1971), in which the artist was shot in the arm by a friend, thus fascinating the national media. About the same time Vito Acconci and others began
presenting body art in New York.
The term “performance” began to be used in the early seventies to designate a wide variety of such activity, most of it solo and taking place outside of
conventional theatres. Indeed, during the seventies it was generally covered
not by theatre but by art publications such as Artweek and particularly by the
journal especially devoted to it, High Performance, founded by Linda Burnham
in 1978. After 1980, however, performance, now also called performance art,
became steadily more visible to the general public and developed steadily
closer ties to the theatre world, both in terms of the spaces used and an
increasing interest in narrative.
The New Vaudevillians
One group of American performance artists has close ties to the circus and
vaudeville traditions, and has sometimes been called the “new vaudevillians.”
These include both solo performers like Stuart Sherman and Paul Zaloom,
who tell stories with junk objects used like puppets, and groups like Seattle’s
Flying Karamazov Brothers, who intersperse their zany narratives with the
astonishing juggling of unconventional objects, or the popular Blue Man
Group, whose bizarre collage of percussion, video and live action, and food
fights, Tubes, has been one of the most durable alternative theatre offerings
in New York in the nineties. The best known of these modern entertainers is
Bill Irwin, who has engagingly combined traditional clown training with avant-
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garde and postmodern references in such popular successes as The Regard of
Flight (1982) and Largely New York (1989).
Although much performance art of the seventies tended to emphasize
bodily activity and abstract form, since 1980 a growing proportion of such
activity has shared with much modern alternative theatre in America an interest in autobiographical exploration, political commentary, or a combination
of the two. Women artists were centrally involved with modern performance
from its beginnings and, as feminist concerns began to develop during the
seventies, leading women performers began to explore these concerns in
their work. One important early center of such work was Cal Arts in Los
Angeles, where Judy Chicago, Faith Wilding, and Suzanne Lacy were pioneer
theorists and practitioners of women’s performance art. Each of these artists
built their early performances out of their personal experiences, while other
artists, such as Eleanor Antin, created and performed alternate personae. A
1976 Los Angeles exhibition of the work of such artists was aptly named
“Autobiographical Fantasies.” The early seventies saw distinctly less such
work on the East Coast, though the dance work of Yvonne Rainer and Simone
Forti looked in this direction, as did the performances of Carolee
Schneemann, most notably her Interior Scroll (1975) in which she read a kind
of performance manifesto from a text she pulled from her vagina.
Rachel Rosenthal and Suzanne Lacy
One of the best known of the California-based feminist performist artists is
Rachel Rosenthal, who became interested in such issues in the early seventies at Cal Arts. Her first series of pieces were personal explorations, culminating in The Death Show in 1978. Later works moved on to social, political,
and ecological concerns, and Rosenthal achieved a national and then an international reputation with such performances as L.O.W. in Gaia (1986) and
Rachel’s Brain (1987). Suzanne Lacy took political performance in a quite different direction, teaming up with artist Leslie Labowitz and others after 1977
to create a series of projects involving hundreds of women in different communities across the country in exploring their histories and interrelationships. Among the best known of these were River Meetings (New Orleans,
1980), Whisper, the Waves, the Wind (La Jolla, 1984), and The Crystal Quilt
(Minneapolis, 1987). Another direction still is represented by Karen Finley,
whose abrasive and shocking confrontations with her audience, such as The
Constant State of Desire (1987), made her one of the most controversial of contemporary performance artists.
Feminist performance artists provided a model for other, primarily solo performers during the eighties and nineties who used this versatile new alternative theatre mode to explore a wide range of personal and social issues. The
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homosexual explorations such as Buddy Systems (1986) or SEX/LOVE/
STORIES (1991) of Tim Miller (who, like Holly Hughes and Karen Finley,
achieved a certain notoriety by being defunded by the NEA in 1990), are much
closer to the monologues of Holly Hughes or Rachel Rosenthal than to the
camp homosexual fantasies of The Theatre of the Ridiculous. Performance art
dealing with different enthnicities has also contributed to this rich mixture, in
the work of such artists as Robbie McCauley, who created a series of performances called Confessions of a Black Working Class Woman in the late 1980s,
Dan Kwong, whose 1989 Secrets of a Samuai Centerfielder explores his tensions
as the gay son of Japanese–Chinese parents in California, and perhaps most
notably Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose co-creation with Coco Fusco, Two
Undiscovered Amerindians Visit (1992), a complex commentary on colonialism, display, ethnic relationships, and modern museum culture, aroused considerable critical attention both in Europe and America.
Bibliography: Alternative Theatre
There are two recommended books devoted specifically to American alternative
theatre, both focused on the period from 1965 onward. Shank’s American Alternative
Theatre and Kostelanetz’s On Innovative Performance(s). Both cover the main alternative artists and companies. Kostelanetz has the advantage of covering material from
the eighties, while Shank includes more California material. Other more general books
on modern experimental theatre, both American and European, are Roose-Evans’s
Experimental Theatre from Stanislavsky to Today, Schevill’s Break Out!, Croyden’s
Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, Goldberg’s Performance Art From Futurism to the Present, and
Weinberg’s Challenging the Hierarchy.
Schevill’s is the most unconventional study, being composed of play texts, essays,
interviews, manifestos, and panel discussions. It includes information on a wide
variety of primarily political groups. Roose-Evans is least helpful on American work,
with chapters only on modern dance and Bread and Puppet. Croyden contains chapters on happenings, the Living Theatre, and the Open Theatre and brief information on
several other groups. Goldberg emphasizes the performance art tradition of Cage and
Cunningham, happenings, modern experimental dance and conceptual art, and overlaps the other books already mentioned only in dealing with Richard Foreman and
Robert Wilson.
Several more theoretical books also provide specific information on American alternative theatre. Wiles’s The Theater Event deals with such leading artists as the Living
Theatre, Wilson, and Foreman as well as with dance theatre. Schmitt’s Actors and
Onlookers looks at modern experimental work through the theories of John Cage, and
Heuvel’s Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance includes chapters on the
Wooster Group and Robert Wilson. Schechner’s Public Domain contains essays on
alternative theatre in the late sixties.
There are countless journal articles on the various groups and individual artists of
the American alternative theatre. Almost every issue of the Tulane Drama Review (subsequently The Drama Review) from the mid-sixties onward contains such material.
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American Theatre and Performing Arts Journal are also excellent sources and Theatre
Journal and Modern Drama have also often included such material since the late
sixties. High Performance, Avalanche, and Artweek have provided the best chronicles
of the development of performance art. In the brief space allocated for this essay,
however, only book-length studies can be mentioned.
The best book on the alternative political theatre in America during the sixties and
seventies is, rather suprisingly, a German study, Kohtes’s Guerilla Theater. It deals
extensively with Bread and Puppet, San Francisco Mime, El Teatro Campesino, the
Pageant Players, the SDS troupes, street theatre, and Yippie actions, and less extensively with more than twenty other political troupes. Sainer’s The New Radical Theatre
Notebook updates the 1965 edition and is primarily made up of scripts from different
groups, but has an extended introduction to the subject. Lesnick’s Guerilla Street
Theatre and Weisman’s Guerrilla Theatre are also anthologies with useful introductory
comments (note the varying spellings of “guerrilla”).
For the Living Theatre, consult Biner’s and Tytell’s books with that title and Beck’s
The Life of the Theatre. For Happenings, see Kirby’s book with that title as well as
Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings and Kostelanetz’s more general
The Theater of Mixed Means. For the Open Theatre, see Pasolli’s A Book on the Open
Theatre and Blumenthal’s Joseph Chaikin. For the San Francisco Mime Troupe, see
Davis’s book by that title, and for El Teatro Campesino, the book of that name by
Broyles-Gonzalez and Elam’s Taking It to the Streets. For The Free Southern Theater, see
the book of that name edited by Dent and Schechner.
There are many books and articles on various artists and theatres in the modern
black theatre movement, but the best general introduction is Williams, Black Theatre
in the 1960s and 1970s. For Split Britches, see the book of that name by Case. For The
Performance Group, see Schechner’s Environmental Theater. Another book concerned
with environmental theatre is McNamara, Rojo, and Schechner, Theatres, Spaces,
Environments. For Squat Theatre, see the book of that name by Buchmuller and Koós.
The three basic works on Robert Wilson are Brecht, The Theatre of Visions, Shyer,
Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, and Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson.
Sources for plays and essays by Richard Foreman are discussed in Gussow’s bibliography. The best general introductions to modern alternative dance and dance-theatre
are the two studies by Banes, Democracy’s Body and Terpsichore in Sneakers. For Laurie
Anderson see Howell’s book of that name. For the Wooster Group see Savran, Breaking
the Rules. The Death of Character by Fuchs includes useful perspective on many alternative productions of recent years.
In addition to Goldberg’s historical survey there are many books on the rapidly
developing field of performance art. Good early surveys are Bronson’s and Gale’s
Performance by Artists and Loeffler’s and Tong’s source book of California performance
art, Performance Anthology. For women’s performance art, see Roth, The Amazing
Decade and Hart’s and Phelan’s collection of essays Acting Out.
3
The Plays and Playwrights
Plays and Playwrights:
1945–1970
June Schlueter
Introduction
Several years after the close of World War II, Joseph Wood Krutch attempted
to identify the distinguishing character of modern drama. Focusing on what
is now commonly thought of as the first phase of modern drama, from Ibsen
through Pirandello (c. 1880–1920), Krutch observed a recurring assumption
of European drama: that a cavernous gap lay between the values of previous
centuries and the values of our own. Those few who clung to the remnants of
moral tradition could only admit, like the despairing old carpenter in
Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena (1844), “I do not understand the world
anymore.”
Such a vision of the twentieth century as fundamentally different from and
alien to all previous human history became, in Krutch’s assessment, the
defining character of “Modernism.” Its assimilation into the national character of America, however, and hence of that country’s drama, was somewhat
delayed. Eugene O’Neill and Maxwell Anderson, he claimed, though responsible for the passage of American drama from childhood to adolescence, were
essentially writing classical tragedy at a time when Ibsen, Chekhov, and
Strindberg were already dead and Shaw’s major work was done.
Krutch acknowledged, of course, the work of those American playwrights
who began extending the boundaries of dramatic form in ways that both imitated and anticipated such European experiments as Surrealism, Dadaism,
Expressionism, and epic theatre. O’Neill’s use of episodic form,
Expressionistic techniques, and masks (The Hairy Ape, 1922, and The Great
God Brown, 1926) contributed notably to new dramatic structures, as did
Thornton Wilder’s fluid treatments of time (Our Town, 1938, and The Skin of
Our Teeth, 1942), Tennessee Williams’s memory devices and slide screens
(The Glass Menagerie, 1945), and Arthur Miller’s cinematic reveries (Death of
a Salesman, 1949). But, for the most part, American dramatists in the period
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between Pirandello and Beckett, roughly from 1920 to the mid-fifties, were not
overly interested in the arbitrary nature of life that so intrigued their
European counterparts. Rather, American playwrights, even after the trauma
of World War II, reasserted their faith in causality and its attendant moral
claims.
Krutch’s monograph, published in 1953, may well have been an accurate
estimate of modern drama to that point. Indeed, it would be unfair to suggest
that Krutch celebrated the conservatism of American drama. For despite his
wish to preserve the perception of self as a continuous unity – an assumption
on which “all moral systems must rest” – Krutch clearly held American drama
in low regard and lamented its more recent tendency to be negative and
defeatist.
Admittedly, modern American drama has been pessimistic, at least if measured by the work of O’Neill, whose plays clearly set the tone for the American
stage. The Iceman Cometh, staged immediately after the war (1946), offered
Harry Hope’s saloon as a metaphor for those whose only hope rests in the
refuge and lie of illusion. Alongside the dreariness of O’Neill, however, there
was the optimism of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, which ran for 890
performances following its opening in 1945, reminding theatre historians of an
American counter-tradition of spirited lightness exemplified by musical
comedy.
In the period immediately after World War II, however, even the Broadway
musical was at risk. Despite such notable successes as Street Scene,
Brigadoon, Kiss Me, Kate, and South Pacific, theatre audiences were dwindling,
no doubt in part because television was finding its way into the American
living room. Visiting companies from England and other European countries
booked New York’s theatres, and Shakespearean revivals commanded impressive runs. But by 1948, hosts of Broadway actors were unemployed and
serious drama needed support.
Obligingly, the two writers who were to take their place alongside O’Neill
as major voices in American theatre both appeared. Between 1945 and the end
of the decade, Broadway produced major plays by Tennessee Williams – The
Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) – and by Arthur
Miller – All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). Together, these
two playwrights sustained and revitalized the Broadway theatre as a venue
for serious plays.
Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams in the Forties
Miller, who was born in 1915 in Harlem, had done his apprentice writing at the
University of Michigan and in the Federal Theatre Project, which he joined in
1938. His first attempt to capture Broadway audiences, with The Man Who Had
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All the Luck (1944), failed, but in 1947 he offered the postwar public a play that
encouraged memories of the heroism of the war years and provoked thought
about the moral responsibility – and losses – of those who remained in the
safety of their fenced-in yards.
All My Sons, which opened at the Coronet Theatre in 1947 in a production
directed by Elia Kazan and starring Ed Begley, touched the conscience of
America: it played to audiences familiar with the Truman Committee’s investigation of a scandal involving the manufacture of faulty airplane parts in
Ohio. In Miller’s play, Joe Keller, owner of a wartime manufacturing plant,
allows cracked airplane cylinders to be shipped to the military, an act that
results in the deaths of some twenty-one pilots. Keller, who initially claims he
will assume responsibility, later allows his partner to take the blame.
Miller sets the play in the suburban backyard, with Keller surrounded by
the comfortable domestic routine that characterized the lives of so many following the disruptive war years. Interrupting the veneer of good cheer,
however, are a wife haunted by a pilot son missing in action for nearly four
years and that son’s former girlfriend, who eventually produces a letter that
confirms Larry’s death: having heard of his father’s culpability in the distribution of the cracked cylinders, the pilot committed suicide in a kamikaze flight.
In a play that works incrementally to raise the audience’s level of awareness,
Keller recognizes, finally, that “They were all my sons” and, in a gesture that
at once accepts responsibility and acknowledges shame, shoots himself
upstairs in the family home. His death, the culmination of a father–son relationship built on lies and denials, both burdens and frees the younger son,
Chris, with the lesson of recognition and forgiveness that, Miller hopes,
extends beyond the family to society at large.
Though contemporary in its focus on wartime decisions and domestic life
following the war, All My Sons resurrects the remnants of the nineteenthcentury stage, relying on the retrospective technique that Ibsen mastered in
Ghosts. In such a structure, the past is a continuing presence, and the exposition renews itself at intervals, as each critical piece of information is revealed.
All My Sons ran for 328 performances, won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle
Award, and was made into a film with Edward G. Robinson in 1948. Its success,
which provided Miller with the recognition he needed to pursue a playwriting
career, proved a mere prelude to that of his next play, Death of a Salesman,
which, under Kazan’s direction, won both a New York Drama Critics’ Circle
Award and a Pulitzer Prize, saw a film version in 1951 (with Fredric March),
and enjoyed major revivals: in 1975, for example, with George C. Scott as Willy
Loman; in 1983, at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, with a Chinese cast; in
1984, with Dustin Hoffman, who also starred in the CBS television production
a year later, which was seen by 25 million; and in 1999 with Brian Dennehy.
When Lee J. Cobb’s 1949 Willy, traveling cases in hand, weighing down the
bulky shoulders of the New England salesman, appeared on the Morosco
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14. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1949, with (left to right) Mildred Dunnock
(Linda), Lee J. Cobb (Willy), Arthur Kennedy (Biff), and Cameron Mitchell (Happy).
Photograph by Fred Fehl. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University
of Texas at Austin.
Theatre stage, it began the public’s decades-long devotion to what many consider the quintessential American play.
Clearly this deluded salesman, defeated by self-absorption and misplaced
dreams, touched a nerve in the theatregoing public, which had lived through
the Depression and World War II and now looked forward to the security and
prosperity of the Eisenhower years. In 1949, Salesman stood as a symbol of
the transition in values that would grip the country. Though nostalgic for the
innocence of prewar America, audiences were beginning to concede the
chasm that divided the aggressive, success-oriented world that could not
accommodate failure and the world of Dave Singleman, the salesman who
operated on the strength of friendship and personal style.
Throughout the play, Willy encourages his sons, commending their misdeeds and turning their limitations into promise. Having returned from a New
England sales trip that he never completed, the tired salesman turns to his
self-sacrificing wife for flattery and support. Assisted by Linda, Willy sustains
his dream; in a yard blocked from the sun by high-rise apartments, he plants
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seeds in a gloomy garden. His suicide stands as final testimony to the persistence and the futility of the American dream: Willy dies expecting that his sons
will collect the insurance. An audience is left with a palpable sense of loss and
a strong sense of the power of the play to test and tease and withhold.
But the power of Death of a Salesman lives less in the plot line than in its
interior drama. The playwright who had trusted Ibsenesque drama just two
years earlier now constructs a form that combines realism and expressionism
in ways that enable an audience both to follow the action and to understand
why Willy’s dream is so stubborn and grand. A sequence of reveries punctuates the play, consuming Willy at critical moments and providing the audience
with privileged insights into a reconstructed or imagined past. Willy slips into
daydreams involving the boys as athletes and as willing Simonizers of their
father’s Chevy; Linda as the patient and frugal wife, mending stockings; a
woman in a Boston hotel room, whose affair with Willy is interrupted by an
unannounced visit from his older son; and a brother, Ben, who, like his father,
left the family to seek adventure and wealth and who, finally, in his endorsement of Willy’s commitment to rugged individualism, lures Willy to suicide.
Miller’s forties plays are important as well for their focus on family, a theme
that came to define serious drama in the postwar years. Willy Loman and Joe
Keller are recognizable figures in the American domestic landscape: both
fathers to two sons, each wants success for their sake; each wants to pass on
the tokens of success, whether wanted or not, to his heirs. Like the families of
O’Neill, however, and particularly the Tyrones (Long Day’s Journey Into Night),
Miller’s are less than ideal. Joe Keller’s leisurely backyard life covers the pain
and guilt that trouble relations between wife and husband and father and son
and that compel audiences to see what Keller would rather conceal. Willy’s
lessons in toughness, womanizing, and lying and Linda’s quiet nurturing of
her husband’s illusions suggestively expose the weaknesses of the family that
seemed to work in a more innocent time.
Similarly important as dramas of “domestic realism,” the form that was to
define American theatre immediately after the war, are two major plays by
Williams, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. In both, the
model of the family that America celebrates is tenuous at best. In The Glass
Menagerie, a domineering mother, whose husband abandoned her, attempts
to hold the family together and assure her children’s success even as she constructs romantic illusions of the past and dreams of a future that has little
chance of materializing. In Streetcar, the now legendary Stanley Kowalski,
crude in style and brutal in behavior, claims his masculine prerogative over
the pregnant, admiring Stella and her homeless sister through intimidation
and force. In the backdrop of Blanche’s life is a marriage to a young man
who proved to be homosexual and committed suicide; in the foreground is a
desperate attempt to marry despite her having violated the womanly ideal.
Williams invites his audience to see – and to understand – Blanche’s fragility
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and her promiscuity within the frame of changing values and displaced
worlds. But there is little to refresh in his portraits of family life: in Williams’s
plays, as in Miller’s, marriage and family, the nucleus of social organization, is
an imperiled institution.
Also like Miller’s plays, Williams’s two dramas examine the seductive but
hurtful lure of illusion. Joe Keller, Willy Loman, Amanda Wingfield, and
Blanche DuBois, in designing imaginary, protective worlds, contribute to a
view of an emerging America as a country on the cusp of change but unready
for it. Though Americans dearly hoped to return to the ordinary after the war,
they were inescapably faced with the imperative of including in their experience the personal and mass horrors of World War II; the promise, and the
threat, that technology held to transform their lives; and the recognition that
the priority of family values was being challenged. In both Miller’s and
Williams’s forties plays, a nostalgia for an older, less conflicted world competes for space with the insistence of a world that is faster, cruder, and crueler
than the one remembered.
Williams, who was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911, spent much of
his childhood in St. Louis, which became the setting for The Glass Menagerie.
In a brief run in Chicago in 1944 and an extended run of 561 performances in
New York at the Playhouse the following year, that play established the nolonger-young playwright, whose career till then had been unremarkable.
Under the direction of Eddie Dowling and Margo Jones, with Laurette Taylor
playing Amanda, the play won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, a
Sidney Howard Memorial Award, a Donaldson Award, and a “Sign” Award; it
saw television versions in 1966 and in 1973, the latter with Katharine Hepburn
as Amanda, and was made into a film in 1950 and again in 1987. The play is
structured as story and re-enactment, with Tom Wingfield, an aspiring poet
who works in a shoe factory and dreams of a life free from his nagging mother
and gentle but vulnerable sister, narrating the story from a fire escape, then
stepping into the family flat to become an actor in their domestic routine.
For Amanda Wingfield, the family matriarch, there is no agenda more
important than matching her slightly crippled daughter, Laura, in marriage,
and she schemes relentlessly to do so. When her mother fails to make a match
with Tom’s friend, a young man whose night school course in radio engineering has identified him as a man on the move, Laura retreats into her world of
illusion, in which a menagerie of glass animals stands as symbol of her fragility. Poignantly and tenderly drawn, Laura has little chance of a life independent of her overbearing mother, who thrives on memories of a romantic youth
in which she was the lady of choice to a gaggle of gentleman callers. The play,
which is offered as a memory, is both powerful and sad, capturing the spirit
and the longing of one who now lives on the edge of poverty but who has
known a finer life.
Amanda Wingfield is one of Williams’s powerfully drawn women, who wins
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15. Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named
Desire, 1947. Museum of the City of New York.
the sympathy, and guarded respect, of an audience that recognizes the futility of her dreams but understands why she needs them. Equally as powerful
is Blanche DuBois, of A Streetcar Named Desire, an English teacher who is run
out of town for her promiscuous behavior but who styles herself “a priestess
of Aphrodite.” More than any major character in the early postwar years,
Blanche embodies the conflicts of a changing world. A lover of poetry and
music and ballroom taffeta, Blanche stands as a fading tribute to refined life
unable to survive in Stanley Kowalski’s crude and raucous world. Herself a
complicated woman, Blanche has memories of an ideal she may never herself
have known and finds refuge in alcohol and lies.
Williams’s presentation of the drama is in eleven scenes, each characterized by the sounds of New Orleans, from blues piano to street vendor cries.
Against the ambience, vitality, and decadence of the city, the Kowalskis plan
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the birth of their first child even as Stanley is given to fits of violence that
momentarily alienate an always forgiving wife. Quarrelsome, demanding, and
obsessed with his masculine role, Stanley regularly asserts his authority, a
misused commemorative to domestic power.
The 1947 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at New York’s Barrymore
Theatre, which ran for 855 performances, was directed by Kazan. The production featured Jessica Tandy as Blanche, Marlon Brando as Stanley, Kim Hunter
as Stella, and Karl Malden as Mitch; it won Williams a New York Drama Critics’
Circle Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Donaldson Award. The play opened two
years later in London, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche, and, in 1951, Kazan
directed a film version, with Leigh as Blanche and, otherwise, the New York
cast. But under pressure to respect both Hollywood’s official morality and the
Roman Catholic Legion of Decency’s objections, Kazan omitted references to
Blanche’s young husband’s homosexuality, dramatized Stanley’s rape of
Blanche only suggestively, and ended the film with Stella, who embraces her
husband in Williams’s play, shouting at her husband never to touch her again.
(It took until 1984 for a film version of Williams’s full text to appear: John
Erman directed Ann-Margret and Treat Williams in the remake.)
While able playwrights all have the personal credentials to dramatize illusion and know well the power of imaginative worlds, there is irony in the fact
that Miller and Williams became the primary architects of postwar domestic
drama. Although Miller was married to Mary Grace Slattery in the forties and
added two children to the marriage, by the turn of the decade he had met
Marilyn Monroe and begun leading a social life without his wife. Miller was to
divorce Slattery in 1956 and marry Monroe, but that marriage would end in
1961 – a year before his third, with Inge Morath, with whom he remains
married, would begin. Williams, a homosexual, never married. Nor was early
family life for either playwright ideal: Miller’s father lost all he owned in the
stock market crash, when Arthur was thirteen, and Williams, whose traveling
salesman father was frequently absent, grew up in delicate health in an
extended family and, at age seven, was uprooted from his southern home and
transplanted to St. Louis. Nonetheless, Miller and Williams often dealt with
the postwar family as a subject.
Postwar and Fifties Playwrights
The postwar American stage also hosted a number of writers who had established reputations before the war, most notably Lillian Hellman (Another Part
of the Forest, 1946), Maxwell Anderson (Truckline Café, 1946; Joan of Lorraine,
1946; Anne of the Thousand Days, 1948), Clifford Odets (The Big Knife, 1949;
The Country Girl, 1949), Sidney Kingsley (Detective Story, 1949), and Elmer Rice
(Dream Girl, 1945). O’Neill’s major career was also of an earlier era – in 1936,
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he became the first (and, to date, only) American playwright to win the Nobel
Prize for Literature – but in 1946, the first year of the baby boom, The Iceman
Cometh appeared: A Moon for the Misbegotten (written in 1943) received its
premiere one year later, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, suppressed by the
playwright’s unwillingness to expose publicly the addictions and deceptions
of the Tyrone family – O’Neill’s own – was staged in 1956.
As the fifties unfolded, Broadway saw productions of Carson McCullers’s
The Member of the Wedding (1950), Kingsley’s Darkness at Noon (1951) and
Lunatics and Lovers (1954), Maxwell Anderson’s Barefoot in Athens (1951) and
The Bad Seed (1954), Hellman’s The Autumn Garden (1951), Robert Anderson’s
Tea and Sympathy (1953), John Patrick’s Teahouse of the August Moon (1953),
Rice’s The Winner (1954) and Cue for Passion (1958), Wilder’s The Matchmaker
(1954), Odets’s The Flowering Peach (1954), Jerome Lawrence and Robert E.
Lee’s Inherit the Wind (1955), and Frances Goodrich’s and Albert Hackett’s The
Diary of Anne Frank (1955).
William Gibson achieved immediate but shortlived fame in 1958 with Two
for the Seesaw and, a year later, The Miracle Worker, which dramatized the relationship between Helen Keller and her tutor. The decade ended on the
promise of this new playwright’s work and that of another, Lorraine
Hansberry, whose Raisin in the Sun carved out a place for African Americans
in the narrative of family drama. In that play, a black family on the south side
of Chicago with ordinary problems and ordinary dreams must make an
extraordinary decision when a representative of the all-white neighborhood
into which they are about to move pressures them to change their plans. The
first African American woman to have a play staged on Broadway, Hansberry
held considerable promise. But shortly after her second play, The Sign in
Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), appeared, cancer claimed her. And Gibson’s
career never did materialize: subsequent plays dramatized events in the lives
of historical figures (John and Abigail Adams, Golda Meir, and, once again,
Helen Keller) but failed to have an impact on the American stage.
The lasting contributions of the fifties proved to be those of Miller and
Williams. Miller produced An Enemy of the People (1951), The Crucible (1953),
and a double bill of one-acts, A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two
Mondays (1956). Williams, after Summer and Smoke (1948), wrote The Rose
Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus
Descending (1957), The Garden District (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and
Period of Adjustment (1959).
Personally and politically, the fifties were difficult for Miller. These were
years of marital transition, with Monroe divorcing Joe DiMaggio, Miller divorcing Slattery, and Monroe and Miller marrying. In 1957, a year into their marriage, Monroe had a miscarriage, which triggered a serious depression that
persisted through the 1961 divorce and until her death in 1962.
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Politically, Miller, long a leftist, became particularly active. In an environment that was increasingly anti-liberal, Miller watched the House UnAmerican Activities Committee conduct its investigation and listened as his
longtime friend and director Elia Kazan and others named people in the
motion picture industry who allegedly had associations with the Communist
Party. In 1956, Miller was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC. His testimony
was open and candid – until he was asked to name others and refused, an act
that resulted in his conviction for contempt of Congress. Though the conviction was subsequently reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia, Miller’s experience reaffirmed his insistence on the precedence
of the individual moral conscience over a law of society, a commitment that
was dramatized with particular force in his fifties plays. In its most assertive
form, it appears in the characters of John Proctor (The Crucible) and Eddie
Carbone (A View from the Bridge), who die affirming their personal sense of
justice.
Professionally, Miller began the decade with An Enemy of the People, which
opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1950, one month after Death of a
Salesman completed its 742-performance run. An adaptation of Ibsen’s 1882
play, Miller’s version speaks with special relevance to the Joseph McCarthy
years. The stubbornly insistent Dr. Stockmann (played by Morris Carnovsky),
intent on doing what is right regardless of consequences, becomes a recognizable and repeatable character in Miller’s plays. Miller’s protagonists are
ordinary men of uncompromising commitment.
John Proctor in The Crucible, a play with suggestive parallels between the
Salem witchhunts and the Congressional hearings, asserts his identity and
individual conscience in the context of a public terror that finally claims his
life. A man of uncommon moral courage, Proctor refuses to yield to those who
would hold him guilty of trafficking with the devil. And though he signs a confession on his dying day, and later retracts it, he refuses to name names and,
finally, champions as his highest value the honor of his name. By contrast,
others in the community who are accused are persuaded that confession
offers the only hope of redemption, and each in turn both admits complicity
and names others.
Proctor’s world is the world of 1692 Puritan Massachusetts, where fire and
brimstone sermons assured that residents attended church regularly and
knew by heart the Ten Commandments. John’s fault is that he has violated –
and forgotten – the Commandment prohibiting adultery, having yielded to the
sensuous attractions of the young Abigail, who becomes the sustaining power
behind the community’s obsession with witches. A shrewd opportunist, she
names those she does not like and manipulatively tries to reclaim her favor
with John.
Miller’s dramatizing of the Salem trials reveals society at its tyrannical
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worst and polarizes good and evil. Clearly, the analogy between the
Communist hunt and the Salem witchhunt was fundamental to Miller’s
purpose. In 1950, Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin, in a devastating gesture
characteristic of the Cold War mentality, publicly stated that 205 Communists
had infiltrated the State Department: though he could name none, the investigations that ensued ruined the careers and the lives of many. For Miller, the
zealous guardians of the public good, in colonial New England and McCarthy’s
America, led the country into the darkest chapters of its history; the play,
which opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1953, ran for 197 performances.
In 1955, a one-act version of A View from the Bridge shared a 149-performance run with A Memory of Two Mondays; the following year, a fuller version,
not produced in New York until 1965, had a 220-performance run in London
(beginning the relationship between that city and Miller that has since grown
into a love affair). It was this version that Sidney Lumet made into a film in
1962. In 1997–98 the fuller version had a very successful Broadway revival.
Genetically linked to Dr. Stockmann and John Proctor, and not unrelated to
Joe Keller and Willy Loman, Eddie Carbone completes the family of strongwilled protagonists that were central to the first decade of Miller’s highly successful playwriting career. In this play, a narrator, Alfieri, tells the story of the
longshoreman’s inevitable death, the consequence of Eddie’s inability to reconcile the social laws of the Brooklyn community in which he lives with the
moral laws that claim him. The family, though important in the two earlier
fifties plays, reassumes the primacy of the forties plays in this drama, which
involves a daughter’s desire to marry a man unacceptable to her father.
Catherine, a niece whom Eddie and Bea have raised as a daughter, is attracted
to Rudolpho, an illegal immigrant with blond hair, a tenor voice, and pointed
shoes. Eddie, who believes in the traditional Sicilian and masculine family
values that make his word domestic law, activates his objection by violating
the code of the Red Hook community, reporting Rudolpho and his brother to
the authorities as “submarines.” In part, Eddie is motivated by a fatherly
desire to protect a vulnerable young woman from the seductions of the
modern world, but Eddie may also have an unacknowledged incestuous
attraction to the girl. In breaking faith with both his family and his community,
Eddie becomes an object of scorn and, finally, is killed in a knife fight with
Rudolpho’s brother.
A Memory of Two Mondays, the slighter of the two plays in the double bill,
has yet to be appreciated, though in the history of modern drama it might
have claimed an important place. Lyrical and sensitive, the piece records the
experiences of workers in a warehouse on two successive Mondays, anticipating, in tone and in action, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Miller’s playworld is a warehouse of endless receiving and shipping, of boredom and
waiting, of returning the next day to re-experience the routine. At this point in
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Miller’s life, however, the personal and the political conspired to disincline
him to redesign the American theatre. Though he wrote a screenplay of his
short story “The Misfits” especially for Monroe and published an occasional
short story, he essentially absented himself from the stage until 1964.
Williams, on the other hand, remained a persistent contributor throughout
the decade. In the early fifties, he wrote three plays that explored the divide
between the spiritual and the physical, a motif he had treated with success in
Streetcar. Critics thought Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1951) (a rewrite of
Summer and Smoke [1948]) overburdened by symbolism, despite the fact that
Geraldine Page, in a production directed by José Quintero, played Alma
Winemiller, daughter of a Mississippi minister, with particular sensitivity.
They were surprised by the robust comic spirit of The Rose Tattoo, staged in
New York in 1950 at the Martin Beck Theatre and made into a compelling film
with Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster in 1955. In that play, the Sicilian-born
widow, Serafina, given to solitude and prayer until she learns of her husband’s
infidelity, allows her sensual urges to return, turning the play into a paean to
the Dionysian spirit. Camino Real (1953), which similarly celebrates the sensuous, but within the insistent presence of death, baffled critics. A series of
expressionistic vignettes, the play dramatizes a variety of experiences and an
assortment of characters in a raucous and threatening New Orleans street
scene.
Following Camino Real, Williams returned to the fold of domestic realism
with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), a seething drama of a marriage on the brink
of disaster. Maggie and Brick Pollitt (played by Elizabeth Taylor and Paul
Newman in the film version) muddle through their relationship under the
watchful eye of Big Daddy, the quintessential southern patriarch (played by
Burl Ives), who, dying of cancer, looks to his favorite son for an heir.
Committed to the values of the Mississippi plantation, Big Daddy doesn’t
realize the extent to which ambivalent sexual identity, sexual frustration,
dependency, and mendacity define the couple’s life. At the end of the play,
Maggie announces that she is pregnant in order to satisfy Big Daddy and
provoke her homosexual husband into making the lie come true. Perhaps
more powerfully than any drama of the fifties, Cat challenged the myths of
family and community, offering the uncertain hope of a future constructed on
moral paralysis and a mendacious lie. A major achievement, Cat, as staged by
Kazan at the Morosco Theatre, won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award
and a Pulitzer Prize, became Williams’s longest running play, and, in 1958, was
made into an MGM film.
Williams closed the decade with three additional plays: Orpheus
Descending (1957), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth
(1959), all three of which were made into films, testifying to the playwright’s
continuing appeal. In Orpheus Descending (a rewrite of Battle of Angels [1940]),
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Williams renews the familiar motifs of individual loneliness, sexuality, and
bigotry and the collective pains of a Southern community that has succumbed
to a degenerate modern world. Heavily symbolic, the play alludes to the myth
of Orpheus and Eurydice, with an updated minstrel lover wandering into the
hellish city to claim a lady. With its cast of decadent characters, including the
figurative lord of the underworld, a promiscuous, alcoholic woman, and a
woman at once elated over having conceived a child and disillusioned at
having learned of her husband’s villainy, the play offers a drama of small
achievements and large disappointments, sharing little inclination to endorse
the psychological, sexual, or spiritual lives of the individuals and families in
this Mississippi town.
Williams’s distress was even more emphatically expressed in Suddenly Last
Summer. The central image of that play – children, armed with tin cans, savagely tearing the flesh of a decadent, homosexual poet, then cannibalizing his
body – morbidly memorializes the loss of a world once defined by civility and
grace, as well as the fears of the misfit who challenges the natural laws of sexuality or withdraws from society to be the artist. Such a character appears
again in Sweet Bird of Youth, as Chance Wayne, who begins as an innocent in
love with Heavenly Finley but descends into a degenerate life style when
Heavenly’s father refuses to permit the marriage. A dependent personality,
who recalls a host of other Williams characters, Chance teams up with a fading
actress and becomes involved in other sexual liaisons as he attempts to establish a career that will impress Heavenly’s father. Instead, his behavior results
in a dose of venereal disease for Heavenly and an operation that leaves her
sterile. Finally, in an unstaged scene reminiscent of the brutal death of the poet
in Suddenly Last Summer and of the too familiar racial lynchings in the South,
a group of townsmen, including Heavenly’s brother, castrate Chance, who
pleads with the audience to recognize the connection between him and them.
In these and all of Williams’s fifties plays, the playwright exploits the myths
of the old South and the realities of the new, endowing life below the MasonDixon line with a metaphorical authority. For Williams, the inclination toward
poetry, kindness, refinement, and grace embodied earlier in a Blanche Dubois
fights mightily against the press of time, which insists on a more prosaic world.
Yet even as the plays of the fifties reveal an attraction to the myth of an idealized South and a resistance to the threat of its decline, so also do they acknowledge the bigotry, the masculinity, the mendacity that was always there. The
site of Williams’s drama is clearly postwar, reflecting as it does the disillusionment and the nostalgia of a society wanting to return to the values it once held
but unable to do so. Yet it is just as clearly a place where the playwright
expresses dissatisfaction with a culture whose values offered little satisfaction in the first place, at least not to those whose imaginations – and sexual
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orientation – set them apart. At a time when America was pretending that only
the evil empire was the enemy, Williams was insightfully acknowledging the
beast within and searching for both self- and others’ understanding.
William Inge
If there was a playwright who shared the respect of Miller and Williams in the
fifties, not for innovation of form but for the sensitivity with which he dramatized the American family, it was William Inge. Born in Independence, Kansas,
in 1913, Inge established his credentials as a playwright in 1950 with Come
Back, Little Sheba, with Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmer in the leading
roles. Set in small-town middle America, as nearly all Inge’s plays are, Come
Back, Little Sheba presents an unhappy marriage twenty years after Doc and
Lola had been forced by Lola’s pregnancy to marry. Now, Lola is barren, the
baby having been stillborn, and Doc is a chiropractor, not having completed
his medical degree. The climactic event of the drama is a drunken rampage,
in which Doc tries unsuccessfully to kill his wife. Though Inge himself finally
succumbed to his own alcoholism and depression, committing suicide in
1973, the playwright characteristically ends this early drama on a note of
regeneration, with a chastened Doc and a maturing Lola having recognized
their weaknesses and acknowledged their mutual needs.
Picnic (1953) similarly dramatizes the repressiveness of small-town routine
through an outsider’s appearance at a Labor Day picnic. Bus Stop, set in a
roadside diner in Kansas, where a busload of passengers is stalled by a snowstorm, introduces an assortment of characters with individual aspirations
and destinations that are painfully constrained. And The Dark at the Top of the
Stairs (1957) follows the lives of a twenties small-town Oklahoma family
poised at a point of personal and historical change: Rubin Flood sells harnesses, a commodity that will not survive the transition from an agrarian to
an industrial society.
In this important cluster of plays, which had respectable runs on
Broadway, Inge examines a large but typical cast of characters and relationships, repeatedly creating situations that dramatize the details of lives anesthetized by habit, dreams suffocated by compromise, and sexuality denied –
the stuff of small-town America. The appeal of Inge’s plays was recognized by
Hollywood, which produced screen versions of each: Come Back, Little Sheba,
with Burt Lancaster and Shirley Booth (who won an Academy Award for her
performance), in 1952; Picnic, with William Holden, Kim Novak, and Rosalind
Russell, in 1955; Bus Stop, with Monroe and Don Murray, in 1956; and The Dark
at the Top of the Stairs, with Robert Preston, Dorothy McGuire, Angela
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Lansbury, and Eve Arden, in 1960. After the unsuccessful A Loss of Roses
(1959), Inge was to continue writing plays into the sixties, many of them oneacts, and he wrote a well-received screenplay, Splendor in the Grass (1961),
which won him an Academy Award. Though Inge’s plays have not had the
staying power of Miller’s or Williams’s, they enjoy pride of place in the history
of drama as examples of the troubled American family at a time when the
country was, presumably, in its halcyon years.
Indeed, the collective force of Miller’s, Williams’s, and Inge’s plays extends
beyond their analysis of that fundamental but discrete social unit to an analysis of the national condition, which, while marked by optimism and excitement, was showing sure signs of neuroses. The fifties were a time of peace,
prosperity, and social progress. This was the decade of color television, credit
cards, and the contraceptive pill, of Jackie Robinson, Jonas Salk, Simone de
Beauvoir, Rosa Parks, Elvis Presley, and Playboy. Yet so also was it the first full
decade of the postwar nuclear age. In the fifties, Americans were building
bomb shelters and participating in air-raid drills, deluded into thinking that
precautionary measures could save them from the devastation of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki that had stunned and humbled the world. It is clear in retrospect
that in documenting the contradictions and eruptions of families in Kansas or
Mississippi or Brooklyn, New York, who failed at domestic coherence, these
playwrights were inviting audiences to see that the American way of life, the
American character itself, was undergoing change. If the country’s central unifying myth – the sanctity and health of the family – was eroding, how would
this young, optimistic, no longer innocent nation cohere?
Edward Albee
Even as the major American playwrights of the fifties were approaching this
question through the genre that has come to be known as domestic realism,
European playwrights were engaged in a more philosophical testing of
postwar meaning, one that demanded a radically different dramatic form. In
1956, an American production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot left the American
theatre reeling. Here was a form of theatre that challenged not only the optimistic vision of a country that still believed in causality, moral responsibility,
and the American dream but also the artistic commitment of several generations of realistic playwrights. During the opening run of Godot, taxis queued
outside the theatre at intermission anticipating fares from those unwilling to
sit through a second act in which nothing happens – again. American audiences, unlike their European counterparts, who were familiar by now with the
Theatre of the Absurd through the work of Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco,
and Beckett, were not prepared for such radical disruptions of the familiar
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dramatic paradigm. Careers took unexpected turns after that and, as public
sensibilities became more flexible, new American playwrights found themselves more willing to experiment with form, to explore the non-realistic
devices that had defined European drama since the period between the wars.
Among the first to react to the Beckett production were Jack Gelber and
Edward Albee, who took the lead in redefining – and relocating – the American
play. Gelber’s The Connection drew on Beckett’s work both thematically and
structurally. A group of heroin addicts, purportedly collected from the streets
of New York and asked to improvise while being filmed, wait for Cowboy, their
contact with the “connection,” who will provide their fix. Like Vladimir and
Estragon, the junkies engage in interim activities but consistently direct their
energies toward the arrival of that which enables them to endure. Their
improvised behavior is complemented by the jazz that accompanies the play,
conveying the flux and the intensity of those who need a fix. Acutely conscious of itself as theatre, as was the Beckett play, The Connection functions
on several levels of illusion, recalling Pirandello’s earlier concern with the
interplay between the fictive and the real and endorsing that continuing
inquiry as central to the contemporary stage. During the intermission, street
junkies from Gelber’s play ask the audience for handouts, disregarding conventional barriers between spectators and stage. Staged in 1959 by The Living
Theatre under Judith Malina’s direction, The Connection ran for an impressive
768 performances.
Some months later, Albee’s The Zoo Story, which had been staged first at
Berlin’s Schillertheater Werkstatt in 1959, appeared Off-Broadway at the
Provincetown Playhouse in a double bill with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. The
Zoo Story dramatizes a moment in the life – and death – of a lonely New Yorker,
whose West Side rooming house features a sexually frustrated landlady, a ferocious gatekeeping dog, a neighboring “queen,” and an empty picture frame.
On a Sunday afternoon, Jerry claims possession of a Central Park bench from
its regular occupant. Jerry spends considerable time winning the attention
and irritating the sensibilities of the more conventional Peter, who has an East
Side apartment, a job, a wife, two daughters, two parakeets, and a TV. The
motifs of isolation, alienation, contingency, and absurdity that had been
defining European drama both between the wars and after 1945 graphically
found their way into an American play through the park bench drama of Jerry
and Peter, which culminates in Jerry’s impaling himself on the knife that Peter
holds in his outstretched hand.
Albee followed this success with The American Dream at the York
Playhouse in 1961. Here was a play that frontally challenged the domestic
values earlier playwrights had begun to question. The American Dream caricatures and distorts the American family, transforming its mendacious and
heartless tendencies into grotesque perversities that both shock and amuse.
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For adoptive parents Mommy and Daddy, the failure of their infant to become
the perfect child, styled in their image, is reason to cut off the offending parts,
then demand a refund for the mutilated child. The couple bargain with Mrs.
Barker of the Bye-Bye Adoption Agency in a hilarious but sobering display of
consumerism gone amok.
Albee’s drama acknowledges the values that have been central to American
culture but refuses either to lament their demise or to endorse their recovery.
Though critics claim Albee’s plays hint at the possibility of restoration, both
The Zoo Story and The American Dream support a vision that may best be
described as posthumanistic. Grandma, after all, in packing bogus lunches
and entering baking contests with day-old cakes, is just as unconscionable as
her opportunist daughter, who lets Daddy “bump his uglies” in order to earn
her inheritance. And this representative of earlier times is hardly shocked by
the commercialism of Mommy and Daddy, who complain of their defective
adopted child. Nor does Jerry in The Zoo Story have any hope of filling his
empty picture frame or of establishing genuine contact with Peter, even after
his lessons on the importance of connecting and his analogy of humans with
animals in the zoo. As Jerry anticipates the Central Park stabbing on the
evening news, he consults his own motive: “could I have planned all this? No
– no, no, I couldn’t have. But I think I did.” Jerry’s ultimate purpose may
merely have been to communicate through the technology of the evening
news, where he will become an electronic image in homes across the nation.
Unlike Gelber, whose subsequent plays – The Apple (1961), Square in the
Eye (1965), The Cuban Thing (1968) – received little critical attention, Albee
remained a significant figure in American drama and a dominant presence on
the 1960s stage.
Albee’s first full-length Broadway play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
which opened at the Billy Rose Theatre in 1962, added layers of illusion to the
family drama of O’Neill as it invited audiences into the living room of a New
England college professor and his domineering alcoholic wife. George and
Martha have managed the failure of their marriage through a ritualized game
of one-upmanship involving humiliation and abuse followed by forgiveness
and reconciliation. The centerpiece of their lives is an imaginary son for
whom they have created a sequence of stories that connect, in provocative
and destructive ways, with events that may or may not have marked their own
unhealthy and unhappy lives. The “Walpurgisnacht” the audience witnesses
is occasioned by a visit from a young couple; he is a new member of the
faculty, she a minister’s daughter given to hysterical pregnancies and drinking that encourages her to tell tales. During the course of the early morning
hours, Martha tells the couple about their son, taunting her husband in the
process, until George decides to perform the ultimate act and end their game:
in a compelling and heart-rending story, he kills the son in a car crash, hoping
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to renew the relationship between himself and his wife without the props of
illusion.
The play proved a sophisticated foray into the nature of illusion, posing
epistemological questions and inviting the kind of postmodern criticism that
the work of Sam Shepard would later engender. But critics of Alan Schneider’s
production, which ran for 644 performances with Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill
playing Martha and George, seemed less interested in those questions than in
Martha’s venomous tongue. Albee won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle
Award, an Outer Circle Award, and a Tony for this play but did not win a
Pulitzer Prize, quite possibly because its language, which was irreverently
vulgar, offended Broadway. The play (filmed in 1966 with Elizabeth Taylor and
Richard Burton as Martha and George) proved critical in the history of
American theatre, for, like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) in
England, it reconstituted the idiom of the contemporary stage. Even more
important, along with The Zoo Story and The American Dream, it made clear
the need for an alternative New York theatre, one that would not merely
comply with conventional public taste and yield to commercial sensibilities
but that would stretch and challenge both audiences and writers.
Sam Shepard and Off-Off Broadway
By 1960, playwrights – and the public – were associating Broadway with commercialism, and a number of writers were refusing to take their places on the
gravy train. Gibson, who had known modest fame for Two for the Seesaw,
referred to his success as a hollow achievement, complaining that the contemporary American theatre (meaning the commercial theatre, or Broadway)
was primarily a place not to be serious but to be likeable. In the sixties, a generation of playwrights was opting for an alternative. As a consequence, Off-Off
Broadway, which came of age in that decade, became the forum for a host of
new, often experimental playwrights who found venues for their work in the
cafés, lofts, and churches of New York’s Greenwich Village and the Lower East
Side.
Even as the Off-Off Broadway venues that had hosted Albee’s first play
began to mature and the Off-Off Broadway theatre went about its business of
redefining the American stage, it was becoming clear that that kind of theatre
was capturing the ethos of the decade. The sixties were, after all, a decade of
political and social contradictions. The Kennedy years were years of progress
in the space program: America had a man in space by 1961 and a man on the
moon by 1969. But so also did these years see the construction of the Berlin
Wall (1961), which made material the political line between West and East, and
the Cuban missile crisis (1962), which brought the country perilously close to
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war with the Soviet Union. If Americans still had a claim to innocence at the
beginning of the decade, they surely lost it in 1963 when their Camelot
President, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas. The shooting proved
the first in a sequence that was to claim the lives of Malcolm X (1965), Robert
Kennedy (1968), and Martin Luther King (1968). Under Lyndon Johnson, the
Great Society Program once again asserted the government’s responsibility
for the underprivileged masses and for preserving the country’s natural
resources for its heirs. Yet even as Johnson was humanizing America, he gave
the order, in 1964, to send U.S. troops to Vietnam: by 1967 there were 380,000
troops fighting on Vietnamese soil. At home, there were protests, by disenchanted flower children who made marijuana a religion; by angry blacks, who
saw their brothers dying in disproportionate numbers; and by citizens concerned with the absurdity of an unpopular and unwinnable war. Meanwhile,
the Beatles had made their debut in England, and women in miniskirts, more
in control of their reproductive lives than ever before, were assuming positions in the workforce alongside men. The decade closed with its third
President, Richard Nixon, in the White House, the nation still stunned by the
riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the 1970 killings at Kent State University. In such a climate, Sam Shepard, a Southern
California transplant, emerged to accelerate the pace and to secure the excitement and the viability of Off-Off Broadway.
Born in Chicago in 1943, Samuel Shepard Rogers III spent the first eleven
years of his life moving among the military bases that marked his father’s
career, then moved with his family to an avocado ranch not far from the freeways and malls of Los Angeles. When he was twenty, Shepard came to New
York, where he (temporarily) traded his hopes of becoming an actor for a
more practical job as busboy at The Village Gate. At the same time, he began
writing plays about contemporary America, which he presented through a
mixture of the plastic artifacts of popular culture and the hallowed remains of
the legendary West. The young playwright’s vision proved one of unrelenting
disruption, of an America that perpetuated the forms of its myths without
understanding their essence. The Cowboy, the Gangster, the Rock Star, the
Millionaire, all part of the American fabric, weave freely in and out of
Shepard’s plays, creating a sense of surface yet curiously celebrating the persistence of American mythology.
Formally, Shepard used paradox, transformation, juxtaposition, and metaphor, connecting and disconnecting fragmentary moments in a seemingly
capricious dramatic design. His characters proved ravaged remnants of the
consistency principle that Krutch, some twenty years earlier, had declared
essential if characters were to be morally responsible. In place of dramatic
dialogue, he offered the monologue, or “aria,” an often lyrical – and always fascinating – expression of lonely self-absorption. Particularly in the plays of the
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sixties, Shepard’s attraction to rock music, hallucinogenics, pop culture, and
high tech, to John Cage, the Who, and the Rolling Stones found substantive
and formal expression. It was almost predictable that Shepard would become
America’s most original and most exciting playwright of Off-Off Broadway.
Though the sixties plays were not the ones that have emerged as the
defining work of Shepard’s career – they included Chicago (1965), Icarus’s
Mother (1965), Red Cross (1966), La Turista (1967), Melodrama Play (1967), and
Forensic & the Navigators (1967) – the young playwright was prolific in that
decade, and a number of those early contributions exemplify the spirit that
this renegade writer delivered to the New York stage. Shepard was to move
further east, to London, in the early seventies, where he both secured and
extended his reputation as an original theatrical voice. By that time, he had
received substantial promotion in Off-Off Broadway venues such as La MaMa
and Caffe Cino; six plays had received Obie Awards; Shepard had won two
foundation grants, a Rockefeller in 1967 and a Guggenheim in 1968; and
Lincoln Center had produced Operation Sidewinder (1970).
The first of Shepard’s plays to be mounted in New York, Cowboys, appeared
in 1964 at Theatre Genesis in a double bill with Rock Garden. Though the script
is no longer extant, Cowboys #2, produced in 1967, provides a sense of
Shepard’s relationship to the concept of the cowboy, which was clearly part
of his mythological West, where the free and adventuresome spirit reigns.
Shepard compared the bonding among cowboys to his relationship with jazz
musician Charlie Mingus, who shared an East Village apartment and a friendship with Shepard and who lent stimulation to the playwright’s own sense of
unbridled energy in the New York of the sixties. If the rewritten version is representative of the first, then Cowboys celebrates the power of language to
reclaim a remembered world and to create an imaginative one of unbounded
potential. Against a backdrop of sounds that define both an urban setting and
the open West, two urban cowboys speak, in successive monologues, of life
in the great outdoors even as two city men of pedestrian mind confirm the
poverty of the urban landscape and language. Along the way, the cowboys
engage in the kind of role-playing that anticipates the transformational drama
of the seventies that fascinated Shepard and others in the Open Theatre.
Rock Garden, which Shepard described as a play about his leaving his
father and mother, rewrites the American family drama in sixties Off-Off
Broadway terms. Here the mythical idea of the garden serves as overlap to a
peculiar perspective of rootlessness and desire. Presented in three scenes,
the play first provides a silent look at the family at dinner: the father reading
a magazine, the teenage daughter and son each sipping milk, and no one
speaking. It then moves to a scene in which the mother, in bed, asks the boy,
in a rocking chair, to run errands as she offers a complaining monologue about
her own father and his. In scene three, father and son, in underwear, engage
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in scant conversation and extended monologues, the father about his imagined rock garden, the son about sex, while masturbating.
Given the unorthodox rituals that inform both of the plays in this early
double bill, it is understandable that the reviews were sour. Fortunately,
however, Michael Smith of the Village Voice recognized the power and the
potential of this new playwright, providing an appreciation and an analysis
that enabled others to engage his surprising worlds. Shepard stayed in New
York for the remainder of the decade; some seventeen plays later, he had
given shape and form not only to his own career but to Off-Off Broadway. At
the end of the decade, having created a host of characters whose hallmark
was the hallucinogenic monologue, Shepard left New York for London – to get
“clean.” (In 1965, he had avoided the draft by claiming heroin addiction.)
The sixties Off-Off Broadway theatre produced the early works of a number
of promising playwrights, including Maria Irene Fornés (Tango Palace, 1964;
Promenade, 1965; A Vietnamese Wedding, 1967); Michael McClure (The Beard,
1967); Rochelle Owens (Futz, 1967); Barbara Garson (MacBird!, 1967); and
Israel Horovitz (Line, 1967; The Indian Wants the Bronx, 1968).
Jean-Claude Van Itallie’s America Hurrah, a trilogy of plays – Interview, TV,
and Motel – that wryly comments on America in the sixties, emerges from an
inventory of some dozen Off-Off Broadway and Los Angeles plays as his most
compelling. Contemporary in attitude, all three plays regret the impersonality of experience: in Interview, through a series of one-on-one conversations
in which communication fails; in TV, through the electronic depersonalizing
of three workers who are seduced by the attractions of television; and, most
conspicuously, in Motel, through mechanical dolls serving as desk clerk and
motel guests.
Kopit, Guare, Wilson, and later Albee
Arthur Kopit, after producing several plays in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
while he was a student at Harvard, made his London debut in 1961 and his
New York debut in 1962 with Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the
Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, a parodic treatment of the Oedipal impulse. Set
in Havana, with Madame Rosepettle a powerful maternal figure, the play presents a scene of irresistible humor: in it, the babysitter, Rosalie, seduces the
seventeen-year-old Jonathan in his mother’s bed, only to be interrupted when
the corpse of his father, stowed in a closet, tumbles down on them. In the
aftermath of the event, Jonathan smothers Rosalie, is grabbed by the animated hand of his father, and, as the sound of harp strings fills the air, floats
out to the balcony to view the sky.
Kopit’s irreverent humor also found expression in The Day the Whores
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Came Out to Play Tennis (1965), in which he satirizes the country club crowd,
who are decidedly unprepared for the arrival of eighteen unauthorized female
tennis players in unsavory tennis costumes, sans underwear. The other Kopit
play of special note (about a dozen were published or staged in the sixties) is
Indians, which opened in an elaborate Broadway production at the Brooks
Atkinson Theatre in 1969, following runs in London and Washington, D.C. In
that comic-strip extravaganza, Kopit appropriates the legends of the
American West: his Buffalo Bill (played by Stacy Keach) epitomizes the
American tendency to romanticize the past and deny its cruelties – a fitting
subject at a time when the nation was embroiled in a war in Vietnam and,
within its borders, the Civil Rights Movement. Kopit’s penchant for absurdity
and black comedy, combined with his considerable skill at counterpoint and
indirection, mark him as a distinctive voice on the Off-Off Broadway stage. A
film version, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, appeared in 1976, directed by Robert
Altman.
John Guare, whose most respected plays did not appear until 1971, also
began his career in the sixties, with The House of Blue Leaves and Two
Gentlemen of Verona, the latter a rock-musical adaptation, by Guare and Mel
Shapiro, of the Shakespeare play. A master of the wacky and the weird, Guare
surprises and amuses his audience with characters on the extremity of experience and carefully designed worlds that are always willing to yield to the
absurd.
Lanford Wilson was among the most prolific of the new writers, with the
sixties seeing some fifteen of his plays produced Off-Off Broadway, many of
them at Caffe Cino and La MaMa, as well as in regional venues. By the end of
the decade, Wilson had been recognized through a Drama Desk Vernon Rice
Award (for The Rimers of Eldritch) and a Rockefeller Foundation grant and had
had a play (The Gingham Dog, 1970) produced (unsuccessfully) on Broadway.
Saddened by the suicide of Joe Cino, which effectively ended the “theatre of
participation,” Wilson, director Marshall Mason, and others founded the
Circle Repertory Company.
Wilson’s major achievement in the 1960s was Balm in Gilead, mounted at
La MaMa in 1965. In that play, a crowded all-night coffee shop serves as the
setting for a large cast of lonely, desperate people, the “riffraff,” the drug
dealers, the prostitutes of upper Broadway. Through fragments of overlapping, repetitious conversations, in the idiom of the street, Wilson provides a
powerful snapshot of the dispossessed underclass and, more obliquely, the
urban American family. Gradually, two characters come into focus: Joe, a
pusher, and Darlene, a hooker, whose nostalgic monologue, lasting nearly half
an hour in production, becomes the centerpiece of a world as bleak but as persistent as those created by Gelber (The Connection) and Beckett (Waiting for
Godot). Through several revivals of this play and through contributions in
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subsequent decades, Wilson established himself as an important voice on the
American stage.
Throughout the development of the Off-Off Broadway theatre, Albee continued to be a powerful force, irrespective of venue. The sixties saw a variety
of Albee’s dramatic work, including Fam and Yam (1960), a short comic sketch
that satirizes the Broadway theatre scene; The Sandbox (1960), a short dramatic piece that provided Albee with characters for The American Dream; The
Death of Bessie Smith (1960), a one-act play that dramatizes the racially difficult circumstances surrounding the death of the blues singer in Tennessee;
four adaptations – The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963, based on Carson
McCullers’s novel), Malcolm (1966, based on James Purdy’s novel), Breakfast
at Tiffany’s (1966, based on a Truman Capote story), and Everything in the
Garden (1967, based on Giles Cooper’s play) – and several major works,
including Tiny Alice (1964), A Delicate Balance (1965), and Box and Quotations
from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968), all of which connected American drama
with the contemporary European style.
Alan Schneider, who directed Broadway productions of all three plays, cast
John Gielgud and Irene Worth in Tiny Alice at the Billy Rose Theatre. Opaque
and symbolic, the play enigmatically explores belief in an abstraction,
whether it be illusory or real. Amid allusions to youthful homosexuality, a
Lawyer and a Cardinal discuss Miss Alice’s huge bequest to the church and
appoint Brother Julian to conclude the arrangements. Both the Lawyer and
the Butler who welcomes the lay brother into Alice’s mansion have had affairs
with Miss Alice, and Brother Julian has a story as well: some years earlier, he
spent six years in a mental facility suffering a breakdown occasioned by his
loss of faith in God. In his interview with Alice, the ancient crone proves an
illusion: Alice strips off her disguise to reveal a youthful, beautiful woman, and
the two discuss their respective sexual lives and Julian’s religious experiences. The meeting ends with the promise of their sexual union and marriage,
though it is not clear whether Julian will marry Miss Alice herself or the tiny
Alice in the miniature model of Miss Alice’s castle – or both.
In fact, little in this play is clear. At the end, the Lawyer shoots Julian,
prompting suspicions of a conspiracy among the Cardinal, the Lawyer, the
Butler, and Miss Alice that repeats itself with each new victim, Julian having
been the unhappy recipient this time. But the role of the miniature model and
the replica of Miss Alice’s castle preempts such a reading as primary, focusing attention instead on the metaphysical play that aligns Albee’s dramatic
experiment with those of Genet. For in Tiny Alice, as in The Balcony and The
Maids, the palpable presence of the illusion reorients the illusory and the real.
For Julian, as for the characters in Genet’s plays, there is a moment, or a
space, where the two meet to create a purified abstraction. Though Julian, at
his death, may or may not understand the metaphysical force of the moment,
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he understands that the union of Miss Alice and tiny Alice, of the mansion and
the model, of the real and the abstract, is what he, in his priesthood, has
wanted and insisted on. Though critics were puzzled, and some distressed,
over the obscurity of the play, Tiny Alice ran for 167 provocative performances.
As though in atonement, Albee countered with a play that returned audiences to the comfort of realism. A Delicate Balance, which opened at the
Martin Beck Theatre in 1967 and won Albee a Pulitzer Prize, ran for 132 performances, with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn as Agnes and Tobias.
Though somewhat elusive, the play may be included among the repertory of
domestic drama that dominated the American stage. In it, a middle-aged New
England couple are visited by close friends, who seek refuge from an unnamed
fear that has enveloped their home. The presence of the second couple provides the occasion for Agnes and Tobias to re-examine their own relationships, upsetting the “delicate balance” that the family, despite insensitivities,
power struggles, and failures, has sustained. Intelligent and thoughtful, the
play invites a consideration of the larger questions of existence and the
careful illusions that keep life in place. (In 1973, it was made into a film, with
Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield in the leading roles.)
The variety of Albee’s art and the intensity of his concern about form are
confirmed by his next contributions to the American stage: Box and
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, presented at the Billy Rose Theatre
following a run in Buffalo. In these pieces, Albee’s theatre becomes, once
again, a theatre of the avant-garde, a minimal, provocative theatre that refuses
to respect the orthodoxies of the stage. In Box, which frames the presentation
of Quotations, the only actor is in the form of a projected voiceover that meditates and muses while the audience looks at the outline of a cube. Precisely
orchestrated, the Voice follows Albee’s stage directions, which even specify
the length of the pauses. Pervading its pronouncements is a deep sense of
loss, encompassing both human experience and art.
In the companion piece, Albee puts four characters on the stage, on the
deck of an oceanliner. They are Chairman Mao, a Long-Winded Lady, an Old
Woman, and a Minister, the last having no lines. In this play, as in Box, Albee
creates a musical structure of form and counterpoint, with actors directed to
speak their lines rhythmically. The interplay of the Long-Winded Lady’s personal past, Mao’s predictions of global catastrophe (a recitation from the Little
Red Book of Chairman Mao), the Old Woman’s doggerel poem, and the intruding Voice from Box bring together the motif of loss. The box, which appears
as prologue and as epilogue to the monologues of Quotations (which take
place within the outlines of the cube) may be a symbolic coffin, containing the
remnants of civilization and art.
Curiously, Albee’s plays, though sharp in their challenge to conventional
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form and contemporary taste, continued to find venues on Broadway. There
was an irony in this acceptance, yet there was an appropriateness in it as well,
for Broadway had played a significant role in the playwright’s youth. Born in
1928, Albee was adopted by a New York theatre owner, Reed Albee, and his
wife, Frances. The infant was named for his adoptive grandfather, a wellknown vaudeville producer; as a child, he was often taken to Broadway plays.
Though Albee was thirty before The Zoo Story appeared, he had been an aspiring writer most of his life: at Choate and at Trinity College and for ten years in
New York while he was working at odd jobs, including one, for three years,
delivering telegrams for Western Union.
Groups and Collectives and Their Performance Pieces
Even as Albee, Shepard, and others were stretching the boundaries of literary
form, Off-Off Broadway was playing host to a non-literary theatrical movement that celebrated the primacy of performance (see also Gussow, “Off- and
Off-Off Broadway,” and Carlson, “Alternative Theatre,” Chapter 2). Among the
earliest, most applauded, and most maligned of the avant-garde groups that
helped create this Off-Off Broadway phenomenon was the Living Theatre,
whose productions of Gelber’s The Connection (1959) and The Brig (1963)
proved seminal in the experimental theatre movement. The Living’s politically
radical, pacifist leaders, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, found a theatrical
counterpart for their political anarchy in a form of production that insisted on
the continuity of theatre and life; that celebrated nudity, sex, and freedom;
and that employed provocation, intimidation, seduction, and shock. Its
1968–69 productions of Mysteries – and Smaller Pieces, Frankenstein, Antigone,
and Paradise Now reflected a demolition of conventional forms too irreverent
for contemporary critics to endure. The Living thrived on a physical and a
verbal freedom so thorough that it was years after the staging of Paradise Now
before the public knew that, amid the riot of theatrical sex witnessed and participated in by the audience, Malina was raped. The event, ironically, perfectly
embodied the absorption of life into theatre, symbolically, though unholily,
consummating the marriage between life and art. Even more ironically, the
aggression inherent in rape became an operating principle for the experimental theatre, which intruded upon its audience’s personal space through verbal
and physical assault.
Intent on achieving an audience participation that would obscure the line
dividing theatre and life, the experimental theatre of the sixties created performance spaces in places where no one suspected theatre could take place
and repealed the law of audience passivity. The Happening, which had its
genesis in the plastic arts with Allan Kaprow and soon became theatrically
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ubiquitous, provided minimal scripts, necessitating abundant improvisation,
and freely mixed theatre and life.
In the Open Theatre, established in 1963, Joseph Chaikin and Peter
Feldman were developing an aesthetic through which they could present
dream, myth, and ritual on stage while breaking out of the rational dictates of
mimetic theatre. The Open worked through meditation, developing a nonverbal stage language of gesture, rhythm, sound, and silence that functioned
more through instinct than training and that, unlike the work of other groups,
reflected passivity, not aggression. Among their important pieces was Van
Itallie’s The Serpent, which ritualistically and therapeutically connects the
archetypes of the Garden of Eden and the primal murder with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and Megan Terry’s Viet Rock,
a fluidly structured satire of the war in Vietnam.
In the late sixties, Richard Schechner and Richard Foreman were redefining
theatrical space through designing environments in which to perform the
primitive rituals best exemplified by the Performance Group’s Dionysus in ’69
(1968). Begun in 1968, Schechner’s Performance Group dedicated itself to
reacquiring ritual through a celebratory event involving actors, audience, and
the free definition of theatrical space. Dionysus in ’69, based on Euripides’ The
Bacchae, proved an orgiastic rendition of the life cycle, beginning with the
ritual birth of Dionysus through the simulated birth passage created by naked
actors. Freely sexual, the production invited spectators to partake in the orgy
and to help create the portions of the event that did not rely on the Greek text.
At the same time, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre was engaging audiences in the Christian ritual of communion, beginning each of its productions with a bread-breaking ceremony before presenting its New Left
activism. John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam were developing their savagely
nihilistic Theatre of the Ridiculous. Robert Wilson was staging his three-hour
speechless epic, Deafman Glance (1971), in Paris, creating a Theatre of
Silence. Jerzy Grotowski was developing his concept of “poor theatre” in
Poland, with Apocalypse cum figuris (1968), and Peter Brook was experimenting with non-proscenium staging and “the empty space,” most notably in his
productions of Marat/Sade (1964) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970). In
the Shakespeare play, the bare stage offered a whirligig of circus trapezes,
conceived not as props but as extensions of the actors’ bodies and voices,
encouraging contemporary interpretations of the classics that stripped the
stage of theatrical cliché.
For the Off-Off Broadway theatre of these performance groups, the dramatic text served as impetus for a range of theatrical experiments. No longer
intent on recording the scenarios of daily experience, theatre became an experience in itself. But Off-Off Broadway’s commitment to non-literary performance proved to be ephemeral, not only because performance events left
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only a few scattered scripts behind but also because playwrights with dramatic texts that deserved staging were exceptionally active as well.
Black Theatre
In the sixties African American drama came of age. Sporadically represented
until that decade, most notably through Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun,
African Americans were now finding venues, in university and regional
theatre, Off-Off Broadway, and, occasionally, on the Broadway stage.
The sixties, of course, saw much social action on the part of black
Americans. In 1962, the National Guard assisted as James Meredith became
the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. In 1965,
inner city blacks in Watts, Los Angeles, rioted; it was the same year that 4,000
blacks and civil rights supporters began their march from Selma to
Montgomery, Alabama, in a demonstration that was to change the history of
race relations.
In the sixties, LeRoi Jones – later Imamu Amiri Baraka – a playwright unwilling to relinquish the identity of black Americans to the national effort to integrate, wrote several assertive plays for the Off-Off Broadway stage: The
Baptism, The Dutchman, The Toilet, and The Slave, produced in 1964, and
Experimental Death Unit #1 and J-E-L-L-O, produced in 1965. In the early years
of Baraka’s career, it seemed evident that the playwright, in taking a political
position on black identity, needed to address some personal identity questions as well. As an undergraduate, Baraka had attended a traditionally black
university (Howard), but he did his graduate work at Columbia; in the sixties,
he was married to a white woman and was part of a Greenwich Village group
of intellectuals for whom creativity was more prominent a priority than race.
At a time when the Civil Rights Movement, the killing of black children at a
church in Birmingham, and the riots in Watts were pressing men like Jones
into action, there appeared to be a disconnection between the angry voice of
the plays and Baraka’s own life style. Within a short time, however, Baraka had
divorced his wife, trained as a Muslim, moved to Harlem, and begun the Black
Arts Repertory Theatre. The Slave, in fact, may metaphorically have anticipated his own personal conversion: in it, Walker Vessels, leader of a black revolutionary group, kills his former wife’s professor husband and watches as a
militant black army assaults and destroys their home.
Though Baraka’s plays vary in the extent of their violence, all are calls for
cultural independence. In The Toilet, a relationship between a white and a
black that might have been does not find expression. In Dutchman, a black
man on a subway elects not to kill a white woman who was harassing him, only
to be murdered himself. In Experimental Death Unit #1, a militant army kills
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and decapitates two white homosexual men as well as a black prostitute, who,
in trafficking with whites, allegedly earned her fate. And in J-E-L-L-O, Jack
Benny’s chauffeur, Rochester, rebels against his abusive and oppressive boss
and wins full redress.
Baraka left New York in the mid-sixties to write for black audiences in
Newark, where Slave Ship (1967), as well as other plays that enable or
promote revolution, was performed. His successor Off-Off Broadway was Ed
Bullins (b. 1935), whose work profiles the lives of blacks caught in a trap no
less forceful and far more immediate than that in Godot. Through a cycle of
plays that begins with In the Wine Time (1968), Bullins expresses frustration
and hope over the individual and collective limitations and potential of
blacks. Later in the decade, Bullins produced a number of short plays with
clearer and angrier political statements about black identity, including A Son,
Come Home, The Electronic Nigger, and Clara’s Ole Man, all staged in New York
in 1968.
Other African American playwrights of the period include James Baldwin
(Blues for Mister Charlie, 1963), Douglas Turner Ward (Day of Absence, 1965),
Alice Childress (Wedding Band, 1966, Wine in the Wilderness, 1969, and String,
1969), Charles Gordone (No Place To Be Somebody, 1969), and Lonnie Elder III
(Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, 1969). Howard Sackler, though white, wrote The
Great White Hope about the black boxer Jack Johnson, which was produced
on Broadway in 1968–69 and won a Pulitzer, a Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and
a Tony. African Americans were assisted in their work by the Negro Ensemble
Group, a Lower East Side theatre company founded in 1967 by Douglas Turner
Ward, Robert Hooks, and Gerald S. Krone, and by Joseph Papp, whose New
York Shakespeare Festival made a commitment to cross-racial casting and to
staging the work of minority playwrights.
Women Playwrights/Feminist Theatre
At the same time, women were just beginning to establish themselves in the
American theatre. Though women playwrights had made significant contributions to the theatre in the early part of the century – Susan Glaspell, Zoë Akins,
and Sophie Treadwell, for example – and Hellman remained a major figure in
American theatre, what is now known as feminist theatre, a phenomenon that
has thrived since the seventies, began to emerge in the sixties, particularly in
the work of Adrienne Kennedy and Megan Terry. Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a
Negro (1964) was especially important, both to her career and to the development of a feminist presence on the American stage. Its focus is on Sarah, a
young woman of mixed race who tries to find a space where she is secure in
her sense of self. The daughter of a black father and a white mother, Sarah
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lives with a Jewish poet. She is aware of herself as a black with commitments
to Africa yet is attracted to the European culture of her white intellectual
friends. In the course of this expressionistic play, which generously uses
masks, Sarah has fantasies of identity, aligning herself with four historical
figures: Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Hapsburg, Patrice Lumumba, and
Jesus. Unable to accept her own identity or to reconcile those of Lumumba
and Jesus, whom she associates with her abusive father, Sarah commits
suicide. In a companion piece, The Owl Answers (1965), Clara Passmore similarly attempts to get “rooted” in history and in self: unable to attend her black
father’s funeral, she seeks out her British heritage through encounters with
an unwelcoming trio: Shakespeare, Chaucer, and William the Conqueror. The
play culminates in the complicated symbolism of a ritual conflagration on the
high altar/bed of St. Paul’s.
Terry’s Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills (1963) presents a similarly
confused young woman, caught, without resources, between her sense of
herself as a former midwest beauty queen and that of her current drugaddicted life as a prostitute on the streets of New York. Calm Down Mother,
performed in 1965 at the Open, extends the fantasies and maskings into dramatic transformations, with the three actresses playing eight characters and
switching identities on demand. In each of the eight units, women are in
circumstances that reveal the range of their limitations as well as their potential as women. The play ends in an affirmation of self as all three celebrate
their bellies, their bodies, and their “eggies,” the source of both masculine
control and feminine power. Five years later, in 1970, Terry wrote a dramatic
tribute to the French philosopher Simone Weil called Approaching Simone.
Clearly, feminist drama was off to a running start.
Broadway in the 1960s: More Miller, Williams, and
Albee
Meanwhile, the Broadway theatre endured. In the sixties, Miller returned with
After the Fall (1964), which opened the Vivian Beaumont Theater’s first season
at Lincoln Center following a run at the ANTA-Washington Square Theatre. The
play is an odyssey of individual anguish, with Quentin, the confessional protagonist, obsessed with trying to understand why he continually searches for
hope despite repeated disappointment. Its form, a conversation with a silent
off-stage Listener and a dramatization of the landscape of Quentin’s mind,
enables Miller to range freely between past and present and to explore his protagonist’s personal pain as a psychological exercise in memorial reconstruction as well as an investigation into the nature of good and evil – before and
after the Fall. Quentin remembers events of his personal and professional life,
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including an encounter with the House Un-American Activities Committee and
a marriage to Maggie, a woman of enormous sexual energy yet undaunted
innocence. At the end of a therapeutic two hours, in which a concentration
camp tower conspicuously looms, Quentin is closer to understanding guilt
and responsibility and prepared to respond to Holga’s hopeful hello.
The following year, Incident at Vichy, which deals with the public side of
guilt and responsibility, documented Miller’s continuing preoccupation with
the Holocaust. The play, which dramatizes an event in wartime France, when
the Vichy government routinely persecuted suspected Jews, is brutally insistent upon a guilt that refuses to discriminate, a guilt suggested by Holga’s
acknowledgment that, since the concentration camp, no one can be innocent.
The event involves eight men and a boy who have been detained; Jews in the
group fear that their false identity papers will be discovered, yet they refuse
to believe in the death camp. One by one, Miller implicates each of the characters in the conspiracy of silence, self-interest, and delusion that enabled the
Nazis to accomplish their barbarity. When only two men are left in the room
– Von Berg and Leduc – there are gestures of generosity, even heroism, with
the old Austrian Catholic offering the French Jew his pass. One cannot decide
with confidence whether Leduc’s motives in accepting it are decent or selfish.
In 1968, Broadway’s Morosco Theatre became home to The Price, a play
that collects the motifs and the concerns of Miller’s earlier work – guilt, moral
debt, self-delusion, choice, and consequence – into a story of two brothers,
together for the first time in years. The occasion is the sale of their dead
parents’ belongings to a shrewd octogenarian dealer, who tries, unsuccessfully, to get them to see the worth of more than just the furniture. Instead, the
two brothers, one a physician and one a policeman, invest in moral posturing
that, despite revelations and accusations, ends where it began, with neither
brother willing to settle the accumulation of moral debt. Solomon gets the furniture, and they the cash, but the differences between the brothers remain
unresolved. Their rehearsal of the choices each made and the obligations that
ensued once again makes the family the focus of attention, and, as with other
Miller families, a framework of self-interest and deception is revealed. Miller’s
vision of the American family, though packaged in many forms, remained one
of suspicion. But with Solomon, whose laughter resonates throughout the
attic space at the end of the play, Miller knows the price that life demands.
During the run of The Price, which saw 429 performances, the millionth
copy of Death of a Salesman was sold, leaving no doubt that Miller’s reputation if not current influence remained strong. Even as Miller’s career seemed
to be once more gaining momentum, Williams’s, by contrast, was clearly
winding down. In addition to an experiment with comedy (Period of
Adjustment, which opened in Florida in 1958 and New York in 1960) and several
one-act plays, the sixties introduced The Night of the Iguana (1961, film version
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1964), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963, film version – Boom –
1968), and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969).
The first of these, The Night of the Iguana, is generally seen as a point of
punctuation in Williams’s career. That play, with its attention to the misfit who
struggles to find personal, spiritual, and social space, is thematically of a
piece with Williams’s earlier work, though its conciliatory tone may suggest a
mellowing of Williams’s own obsessions. The defrocked minister who is the
focus of Iguana was locked out of his church after kneeling, then reclining,
with a young woman, who, in remorse, tried to commit suicide. Now a tour
guide, he visits a resort near Puerto Barrio, Mexico, run by Maxine Faulk.
Other hotel guests, including Hannah Jelkes, an artist, and her ninety-sevenyear-old poet grandfather, who dies after completing his most lyrical poem; a
busload of teachers from the Baptist Female College in Blowing Rock, Texas;
and four young Germans form the backdrop for the experience of The
Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, who is removed from his responsibilities as
tour guide and dramatically urinates on the ladies’ luggage but who apparently pairs off at the end with Maxine. There is a sense of resignation and reconciliation in this Williams play, which still acknowledges the struggle but
seems more willing to yield.
Following Iguana, which ran for 316 performances at the Royale and was
made into a film in 1964 with Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr, and Ava Gardner,
Williams’s plays became less structured and more philosophically abstract,
exploring the culminating moments of life and of art with less of the frustration and anger of the earlier plays. In The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any
More, he writes a modern-day Everyman, with Flora Goforth in search of a way
to exit this life with dignity and acceptance. She is assisted in her quest by a
man in lederhosen, who is both poet and Angel of Death. Chris Flanders’s
mission is to give her not what she wants but what she needs: he cryptically
does so by presenting her with a mobile called “The Earth is a Wheel in a Great
Big Gambling Casino.” The withdrawn widow dies behind a screen with Chris
escorting her across the bar.
In In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Williams insistently explores the artistic imagination, through an American woman, Miriam, who fears the loss of her vitality, and her painter husband Mark, whose style is in a dramatic transition.
When the gallery director Leonard arrives from New York, he attempts to convince Miriam not to continue her tour alone. But she has little compassion for
her dependent husband, who, faced with her cold refusal, collapses and dies.
Though cryptic in purpose, the play invited critics to see the piece as the
(autobiographical) profile of an artist at a low point in his career.
The play may have proved prophetic, for in the dozen or so years remaining before the freak occurrence that claimed his life in 1983 (a nasal spray cap
suffocated him), the playwright was to enjoy little commercial success.
Though theatregoers may recall the titles of some of Williams’s seventies and
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eighties plays – such as Small Craft Warnings (1972), Vieux Carré (1977), and
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) – none of these promises to gain prominence
in the repertoire of American theatre, and many – Seven Descents of Myrtle
(1968), Out Cry (1971), This Is (an Entertainment) (1976), The Red Devil Battery
Sign (1975), Demolition Downtown (1977), Crève Coeur (1978), Something
Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and A House Not Meant to Stand (1982) – have
already disappeared from the vocabulary of the stage.
Neither Miller nor Williams left a major mark on the sixties stage. Albee was
center stage now, with plays that disturbed complacent audiences and
pushed against the boundaries of the realistic form. He shared the spotlight
with an unlikely partner: a playwright who thrived on the conventions of the
comic form and capitalized on the public’s penchant for the one-liner. Born in
the Bronx in 1927 (a year before Albee), Neil Simon proved a commercial phenomenon: at one point in the sixties, four of his plays were in simultaneous
runs on Broadway.
Broadway’s Star: Neil Simon
Neil Simon had begun his writing career doing comedy sketches and revues
for radio and television with his brother Danny. His break on Broadway came
in 1961, with his first play, Come Blow Your Horn, which premiered the previous year at the Bucks County (Pennsylvania) Playhouse and began a
sequence of successes that remained uninterrupted until 1970, when The
Gingerbread Lady, Simon’s first effort to mix comedy and tragedy and his first
commercial flop, suggested that the public may have had its fill of Simon.
(The signal proved false, for Simon, even into the late nineties, though somewhat tempered, continues his appeal.) A master of the running gag, the circular joke, and the witty one-liner, Simon prods his audiences into the kind
of unrestrained laughter he himself experienced as a youth at a Charlie
Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Laurel and Hardy movie. Through recognizable
characters (often caricatures) and familiar settings – particularly the urban
middle-class American living room – Simon, himself the son of a truant father,
comically and conservatively upholds the value and the primacy of marriage
and family.
In Come Blow Your Horn, two brothers, Buddy and Alan, modeled on Neil
and Danny, enjoy their independence in New York in the older brother’s apartment. Their bachelor exploits, drawn against the backdrop of parents unable
to release their sons to the world, prove an education to Alan. By play’s end,
the profligate older brother has matured into a man who, sounding much like
his father, prepares to settle into marriage. Along the way, there are appearances by Peggy, the woman upstairs, with whom Alan has been sexually
involved; Connie, who arrives with suitcases in hand, ready to move in with
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Alan, with or without marriage; Mr. and Mrs. Baker, parents of the young men;
and, finally, Aunt Gussie, who drops in to find Buddy alone, anticipating an
evening with a woman named Snow. Mrs. Baker’s antics provide much of the
humor of the play, which relies on the interrupting doorbell and telephone
rings to activate a fresh sequence. Her efforts to be helpful by taking messages
even though she cannot find a pencil result in a mêlée of confusions that neutralize some of the crueler behavior of her domineering husband, who has
employed both their sons in the family business. It is Mr. Baker who animates
the play, however, for, at its heart, Come Blow Your Horn is not only an exploration of traditional and newer values but also an inquiry into what manhood
and masculinity mean, particularly within the context of family. Though it
took the prolific Simon three years to write this first Broadway play, the
finished product bears the mark of a craftsman adept at constructing and sustaining a plot, renewing an audience’s laughter periodically, and exploring
family values at moments of challenge or change. Directed by Stanley Prager,
the New York production at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre enjoyed a quite
respectable 677-performance run.
At the end of the decade, following the successes of Barefoot in the Park
(1963), The Odd Couple (1965), and Plaza Suite (1968), a new Simon play
proved once again to be a crowd-pleaser. Last of the Red Hot Lovers, which
opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in late 1969 and ran for 706 performances, is, like Come Blow Your Horn, typically Simon. Structured in three
parts, the play presents the adventures of Barney Cashman, who is involved
sequentially with three women. The setting is Barney’s mother’s apartment,
which he uses during her absences to serve him in his first adulterous affair.
Prompted by the boredom of daily life, the middle-aged owner of a fish restaurant, who worries that his fingers smell of fish, invites Elaine Navazio to the
apartment; she is a woman given to alcohol, cigarettes, and casual affairs, and
her agenda does not include the romantic prologue that Barney imagines.
Prevented by their incompatible visions of sexual experience to accomplish
the act, Barney is left disappointed and disillusioned.
Eight months later, he tries again, this time with Bobbi Michele, who tells
stories of incipient kinky sex that intrigue Barney. Barney joins Bobbi in a joint
– his first experience with marijuana – which renders him hopelessly convinced that he is dying and her adamant about her own independence and the
viciousness of others.
In the third of his unsuccessful trysts, which occurs one month later,
Barney plays host to Jeanette Fisher, who proves to be a deeply depressed
woman who clings to her purse, does not enjoy sex, and is married to a longtime friend of the Cashmans. When Jeanette leaves the apartment, Barney has
secured from her an admission that some people are decent. Despite his
aggressive behavior, however, Barney’s sexual appetite and his quest for a
beautiful, decent woman have not been satisfied. The play ends with Barney
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on the phone to his wife, asking the reluctant woman to meet him in his
mother’s apartment.
In another playwright’s hands, such portraits of neurotic people and relationships may well challenge the conventions of marriage and family. In
Simon’s repertory, however, these institutions, no matter how flawed, survive,
if not on the stage then at least in the minds of the audience, who are always
made aware of what might have been. It is not surprising that virtually all of
Simon’s sixties plays – and subsequent ones as well – have been made into
films, for they tap into the ordinary lives of middle-class urban Americans
struggling to communicate and to understand. Simon’s playful humor makes
palatable each desperate character and occasion; theatregoers leave Simon’s
plays feeling good about themselves and comfortably entertained.
The Musical
The Broadway musical, explored in more detail in Chapters 2 (Maslon,
“Broadway”) and 4, which typically had a goal similar to Simon’s, remained a
staple of the American theatre during the postwar years. Blockbuster musicals such as Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), My Fair Lady (1956), The
Sound of Music (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964) – to name just a few –
continued to please the Broadway tourist crowd – and, for many, to define the
American theatre.
In 1967, however, a musical of another sort premiered at the Public Theater.
Highly theatrical and entertaining, Hair, a rock musical, captured the spirit
and the conflicts of the sixties, pitting the long-hair generation against the
Establishment and celebrating nudity, free love, and rock’n’roll (see
Aronson’s discussion of these and other factors in Chapter 1). A central character, Claude, finally opts not to burn his draft card, but he winds up a casualty of Vietnam. Galt MacDermot’s music and Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s
lyrics were insistently contemporary, promising the deliverance of the conservative musical theatre into the Age of Aquarius. Though Hair ran for 1,844
performances in two venues, first at the Public and then on Broadway, it
proved an isolated event, with little lasting influence on the form of the
musical stage.
Conclusion
By the end of the sixties, the Broadway theatre’s customer base was shrinking, as were its artistic standards. Millions of families across the nation owned
television sets, which not only seduced audiences into the effortless evening
in the living room armchair but also set a new, diminished standard for drama.
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Writers of talent found themselves generating sitcoms, serials, and Westerns
in return for handsome financial rewards. At the same time, Broadway was
coping with increases in operating costs: by the end of the fifties, a serious
play needed a weekly income of $20,000, a musical $40,000, to offset the
$250,000–$500,000 it cost to underwrite the show. This situation would only
worsen throughout the remainer of the century. To help assure the show’s
success, producers relied on expensive advertising and star appeal, denying
the price of a ticket to all but the elite, for whom seeing a Broadway play
became a status game. Discriminating theatregoers with more slender wallets
abjured the Broadway stage or selectively invested in a play – after they read
the review. For the 1969–70 season, Broadway mounted only sixty-two plays,
200 fewer than had been on its boards forty years earlier. Given the excesses
and the mediocrity of Broadway, made palpable in its inhospitality to serious
playwrights and its reluctance to revise the musical after Hair, it is not surprising that the Off-Off Broadway theatre materialized.
The twenty-five years following the close of World War II saw a number of
defining moments in the development of the American theatre. Miller,
Williams, Inge, and Albee, whose plays were produced on Broadway, recognized the conventions of culture and theatre that were too stubborn to disappear, yet treated them in original and provocative ways, reconstituting the
form of the domestic play and extending America’s chronic inquiry into the
role of the nuclear family. At the same time, a conservative Broadway theatre,
marked by the comedies of Neil Simon, sustained traditional forms and values,
as did the ubiquitous musical, a collaboration of song, book, and dance, often
bundled into leg shows and lavish entertainments, that continues to attract
audiences from around the world and to sustain New York’s reputation as the
theatre capital. With the rise of regional theatres and the emergence of Off-Off
Broadway, however, the focus that Broadway once enjoyed has been diffused,
with Broadway increasingly identified as a commercial theatre designed for
popular audiences rather than as the venue for the serious play. In the sixties,
Shepard and a host of playwrights who might not otherwise have found a
stage for their work turned to the developing Off-Off Broadway theatre, which
welcomed not only the experimental playwright but a band of new performance groups as well. Mapping the progress of these postwar years reveals a
variegated American stage, whose elevations and depressions collectively
create a cartography of an art form distinctively our own.
Bibliography: Plays and Playwrights: 1945–1970
Though no survey of American drama precisely dedicates itself exclusively to the
twenty-five years immediately following World War II, a number of more comprehensive studies cover the plays and playwrights of this period. Bigsby’s work in this area
June Schlueter
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is extensive. In an early analysis, Confrontation and Commitment, he offers an assessment of a developing contemporary American theatre. Focusing on the work of Miller,
Albee, James Baldwin, Jones (Baraka), Hansberry, and some of the Off-Off Broadway
performance groups, including the Living Theatre, Bigsby observes that American
audiences, twenty years after World War II, were still attracted to the well-made play
and the American theatre had not fully absorbed the lessons of the European stage.
From 1982–85, Bigsby published an exceptionally insightful three-volume study of
the American drama, with volumes two and three offering coverage of these years.
In A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Volume Two:
Williams/Miller/Albee, Bigsby provides information and analyses on the work of these
three major playwrights within the social, political, and theatrical contexts of postwar
America. In volume three, Beyond Broadway, he covers the Off- and Off-Off Broadway
theatre movements, critically assessing the patterns and the anomalies of this burgeoning alternative theatre. In yet another study, Modern American Drama 1945–1990,
he extends his analyses of the work of major playwrights, including Miller, Williams,
Albee, and Shepard.
Other valuable studies include Adler, American Drama, 1940–1960, which offers a
solid overview of the twenty years indicated in its title, with particularly helpful comments on the major writers treated here. Berkowitz’s American Drama of the Twentieth
Century clusters plays chronologically, with the relevant sections running from
1945–60 and 1960–75. Though Cohn’s New American Dramatists and Roudané’s
American Drama Since 1960 include only ten years of the period in focus here, Cohn
provides a wide-ranging survey of playwrights and Roudané brings special emphasis
to the work of African Americans and women. Krutch, in “Modernism” in Modern
Drama, a monograph referenced in the early paragraphs of this essay, offers a personal
view on modern European theatre, providing a context for his assessment of a modern
American theatre in its infant years. And finally, Realism and the American Dramatic
Tradition, edited by Demastes, though not limited to this twenty-five-year period,
includes a number of relevant essays.
Readers interested in a critical overview of Arthur Miller’s work may consult any of
several introductory books on the plays, including Moss, Arthur Miller ; Carson, Arthur
Miller ; Welland, Miller: The Playwright; Schlueter and Flanagan, Arthur Miller – as well
as Bigsby’s volume on Miller, Williams, and Albee mentioned in the previous paragraph
and The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, which he edited. Collections of essays
worth pursuing are Arthur Miller: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Corrigan;
Critical Essays on Arthur Miller edited by Martine; and Arthur Miller: New Perspectives,
edited by Robert A. Martin. Valuable interviews appear in Conversations with Arthur
Miller edited by Roudané and Arthur Miller and Company edited by Bigsby. Essential
supplements to any critical reading of Miller’s work are The Theater Essays of Arthur
Miller edited by Robert A. Martin and Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, in which the
playwright offers generous commentary on his life and his writing.
There are a number of introductory studies of Tennessee Williams’s work, among
them Tischler, Tennessee Williams; Jackson, The Broken World of Tennessee Williams;
Falk, Tennessee Williams; Londré, Tennessee Williams; and The Cambridge Companion
to Tennessee Williams, edited by Roudané. Murphy’s Tennessee Williams and Elia
Kazan provides important information on how one of America’s most influential directors translated the texts of Williams’s plays onto the stage. Readers interested in the
film versions of Williams’s plays should consult Yacowar, Tennessee Williams and Film,
which treats fifteen translations of plays to the screen – all released in the fifties and
sixties. Two collections of essays worth exploring are Tennessee Williams: A Collection
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of Critical Essays edited by Stanton, and Tennessee Williams: A Tribute edited by
Tharpe. In 1975, Williams published his Memoirs, a volume that joined a number of biographical treatments already in print and anticipated several that were to appear after
his death in 1983. The best of these is a critical biography by Spoto, The Kindness of
Strangers, though the most thorough biography of his early life is Leverich’s Tom.
Interesting interviews with the playwright are collected in Conversations with
Tennessee Williams edited by Devlin.
Early assessments of Edward Albee’s work include Bigsby, Albee; Cohn, Edward
Albee; and Rutenberg, Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest – all in 1969. More recent –
and confirming – analyses may be found in McCarthy, Edward Albee; Roudané,
Understanding Edward Albee; and Amacher, Edward Albee. Two edited volumes that
offer focused analyses of particular Albee plays are Edward Albee: A Collection of
Critical Essays edited by Bigsby, and Critical Essays on Edward Albee edited by Kolin
and Davis. A stimulating set of interviews may be found in Conversations with Edward
Albee, edited by Kolin. Those interested in a comprehensive bibliography of primary
and secondary works may wish to consult Giantvalley, Edward Albee: A Reference
Guide.
Insights into Sam Shepard’s work may be culled from Tucker, Sam Shepard; Mottram,
Inner Landscapes; Hart, Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages; DeRose, Sam Shepard; and
two recent studies: Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard, and Wade, Sam Shepard and
the American Theatre. Kimball King’s Sam Shepard: A Casebook is a helpful collection
of essays, with several on the sixties plays. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam
Shepard, edited by Marranca, offers a compendium of perceptive essays, including
several by Shepard. Oumano’s biography, Sam Shepard, provides a solid analysis of
this fascinating figure’s life and work. And Bigsby’s chapter on Shepard in the Beyond
Broadway volume mentioned in the opening paragraph is essential reading.
Readers interested in Neil Simon’s sixties plays should consult McGovern, Neil
Simon, or Johnson, Neil Simon. Simon’s Rewrites: A Memoir offers limited insights.
Those interested in William Inge would be intrigued by Voss, A Life of William Inge, and
by Leeson, William Inge: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Other full-length
studies of individual dramatists who played important roles in the twenty-five years
after World War II include Cheney, Lorraine Hansberry; Auerbach, Sam Shepard, Arthur
Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater ; Barnett, Lanford Wilson; Brown, Amiri Baraka, and
Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones; Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of
Adrienne Kennedy, edited by Bryant-Jackson and Overbeck, and Kennedy, People Who
Led to My Plays; and Samuel Hay, Ed Bullins.
There are a host of books on the American musical theatre. See Degen, Chapter 4,
for suggestions.
Important reference books include Roudané, Contemporary Authors: Bibliographical
Series, Volume Three: American Dramatists, which offers a primary and secondary bibliography as well as bibliographical essays on a number of playwrights from this
period (Albee, Baraka, Hansberry, Kennedy, Kopit, McCullers, Miller, Shepard, Terry,
Williams, and Wilson), and Bronner, The Encyclopedia of the American Theatre
1900–1975. Methuen’s “Writers on File” series is particularly helpful, with compact
volumes on many of the playwrights discussed in this chapter. Arnott’s Tennessee
Williams on File offers a representative example: the book catalogues the plays, providing information on publication and production as well as excerpts from critical
reviews. Brief biographies of playwrights and entries on many plays from this period
can be found in Wilmeth and Miller.
Plays and Playwrights Since 1970
Matthew Roudané
Introduction
American playwrights since 1970 have moved their way toward the center of
the national creative consciousness. The best have done so by making significant contributions to the rhetoric of nationhood, to the languages that define
the “Americanness” of American drama, and to the symbology of the self. Of
the numerous forces affecting the cultural production and reception of texts
and performances, perhaps one of the most distinguishing shifts in recent
American drama concerns its relationship to Broadway. When Eugene O’Neill,
Susan Glaspell, and Alice Gerstenberg first conferred upon the American stage
its modernity, Broadway in New York City was the Great White Way. Then,
Broadway was the site of dramatic originality. Broadway was the launching
site for playwrights who, with uneven achievements, defined the scope and
emphasis of American drama. Broadway somehow mattered. Its stages mirrored the circulation of social energia. When O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922)
premiered, the Mayor of New York City, troubled by the play’s themes, tried
to close the show. The public, in response, flocked to see one of the first successful Expressionistic plays staged by an American. When at mid-century
Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Lorraine Hansberry
extended as they refurbished notions of American theatrical modernity,
Broadway was still a vibrant source of theatrical energy. Four plays in a fouryear span confirm the point: The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named
Desire (1947), All My Sons (1947), and Death of a Salesman (1949) together ran
for 2,466 performances. By contrast, Williams’s last Broadway play staged
prior to his death, Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), closed after only
fifty-one showings to indifferent reviews. Miller simply chose to premiere
selected recent plays outside of Broadway, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan opening
in London in 1991 and Broken Glass premiering in New Haven, then London,
and finally New York City in 1994.
As the twenty-first century begins, Broadway has changed. If the earlier
Broadway was an initiating theatre, where key plays received their premieres,
today many of the best American playwrights open their shows both geographically and symbolically well beyond Broadway. The decentralization
process is unmistakable. Edward Albee opened Counting the Ways (1976) in
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London and Marriage Play (1987) and Three Tall Women (1992) in Vienna.
David Mamet staged Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) and The Cryptogram (1994) in
London. Sam Shepard waited two decades before staging a play, A Lie of the
Mind, on Broadway (1985). Further, these three playwrights, along with an
increasing number of fellow dramatists, began directing their own works, an
exercise of authorial control rarely seen during the mid-century glory days of
such directors as Elia Kazan and José Quintero. In some respects, Albee’s
point in a 1962 article, “Which Theatre Is the Absurd One?” – in which he calls
Broadway the true Theatre of the Absurd because of its cultural production
of and insistence upon superficial work – remains true today. For the many
cultural and ideological reasons suggested throughout this History, Broadway
now is a receiving theatre. Broadway, a showcase theatre, is a place where
musicals, classics, or guaranteed contemporary sensations find their way to
the stage. So it is hardly surprising that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part
One: Millennium Approaches was first staged in Los Angeles in 1990, in San
Francisco in 1991, in London and then back to Los Angeles (with Part Two:
Perestroika) in 1992, and – now a profitable play with its moral seriousness left
unblemished by commercial pressures – finally opened in New York City in
1993. It is scarcely astonishing that works by “major” playwrights featuring
entertainment stars, who ensure packed houses, occasionally open on
Broadway, as was the case with Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow (1988), which starred
Madonna, or the 1988 revival of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), which featured the comedic talents of Steve Martin and Robin Williams.
If Broadway no longer appears as alluring to actors as it did for Carrie
Meeber, Theodore Dreiser’s fated star in Sister Carrie (1900), the United States
today nonetheless continues producing a healthy number of “major” and
lesser-known but still significant dramatists. Thus this chapter examines
selected playwrights who, if not strictly linked to Broadway, have seen their
best work staged in New York City and, indeed, throughout the country, and
who may be regarded as major shapers of the American stage. Such a selective survey should provide some notion of the aesthetic and cultural power
of American drama since 1970, while admittedly, a result of space limitations,
omitting many worthy writers from this discussion. As we shall see, the
American dramatists’ preoccupations with the status of the imagination, the
primal family unit, with a Heideggerian angst, and with the collapse of physical, mental, and moral space that Christopher Bigsby identified throughout
his three-volume A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama
have become even more pronounced as we approach the next millennium. No
wonder Tennessee Williams in the seventies wrote a play called Small Craft
Warnings (1972), Arthur Kopit in the eighties composed a drama entitled End
of the World (1984), and Neil Simon in the nineties penned a comedy called
Lost in Yonkers (1991), fitting titles foretelling the shifts in cultural tastes and
theatrical energies.
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When in the early sixties, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, leaders of the
Living Theatre, were asked to define the artistic vision of the Living Theatre,
they replied, “To increase conscious awareness, to stress the sacredness of life,
to break down the walls” (Beck, “Storming the Barricades,” 18). In summarizing the artistic goals of the Living Theatre, they did much more than issue a
mere manifesto celebrating their militant, Artaudian stage. More importantly,
Malina and Beck did nothing less than distill, in fifteen words, what would
evolve into one of the most compelling, distinctive features of American
drama since 1970.
Our best dramatists do not compose all of their plays with these three
specific ideas in mind. Yet since 1970 America’s exemplary playwrights seem
emotionally and intellectually to accept Malina and Beck’s pronunciamento.
With the twenty-first century upon us, the idealism, ferocity, and optimism of
Malina’s “Directing The Brig” (1964) and Beck’s “Storming the Barricades”
(1964) may read more like a dream-glide down memory lane. However, their
impassioned belief that the theatre increases consciousness, celebrates the
sacred, and, politically as well as existentially, produces change remains as
true for Hanay Geiogamah, Tony Kushner, and Holly Hughes as it did for
Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Tennessee Williams. If yesterday’s revolution has been appropriated by today’s mainstream, the pioneering work of
Malina and Beck foretold the social confrontations and personal commitments that so characterize recent American drama.
Engaged by the contributions of Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, and Susan
Glaspell, and the subsequent work of Clifford Odets, Robert Anderson, Lillian
Hellman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and William Inge, American audiences grew increasingly eager to receive new theatre. Despite considerable
cultural, financial, and artistic blockades that to this day inhibit the American
dramatist, at no time in our cultural history have our playwrights been in a
better position to move the American stage from the margins to the center of
American cultural life. This generative process is ever on the verge of collapse, of course. Yet American dramatists have learned from their past. They
transcended the circus, the carnival, the minstrel show, the farce, and the
vaudeville. With an eye toward the future, American dramatists have embedded in their plays a kind of a moral seriousness that the novelists and poets
long ago interleaved within their artistry.
The sources of this generative process were many. There was no one single,
unifying troupe, movement, or playwright responsible for launching the
American theatre since 1970. After all, issues of race, gender, tastes, and ideologies in an increasingly heterogeneous universe precluded a unified American
dramatic canon. The American dramatic imagination seemed as varied and
contradictory as the country itself. Recent American drama emerges as a dizzying amalgam of many voices, many peoples, and few resolutions. The contemporary American playwright, whose conceptions of drama, society, and
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the individual are as different as any audience could imagine, implicitly shares
Malina and Beck’s conviction that drama has a unique capacity to produce
both social change and individual awareness. The mimetic energy of contemporary American drama reflects a culture seeking to locate its identity
through the ritualized action and incantatory language inscribed in live
theatre. The playwrights, directors, and players involved in serious theatre in
this country presuppose the bewitching power of the theatre to trigger public
awareness and private insight, or at least to raise the possibility that the
theatre as public laboratory can ask the audience to see and be seen in both
a personal and public context. Thus beyond their differing theoretical positions and political strategies, recent American dramatists seem united in their
collective quarrel with American history and thought, a quarrel that manifests
itself in ideologically and metaphysically diverse scripts.
American drama, for Julian Beck, had the capacity to “involve or touch or
engage the audience, not just show them something.” He felt that his drama,
at once a political and metaphysical gesture, “arose out of a crying need on
the part of the authors, and of us, to reach the audience, to awaken them from
their passive slumber, to provoke them into attention, shock them if necessary, and, this is also important, to involve the actors with what was happening in the audience” (Beck, “Storming the Barricades,” 21). In retrospect, we
can now see that Beck really could be speaking with equal force and eloquence about John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation (1990), Susan
Yankowitz’s Night Sky (1991), or Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirrors
(1993).
Twentieth-century American drama has always been energized by ritualized forms of confrontation and expiation. With the country’s ongoing dialogues about the sexes and races, and with the country’s past involvement
in the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War, the playwright’s awareness of
and uneasiness with American history and politics underscores the notion
that, despite the Founding Fathers’ claims to democracy, the United States
has never in its history experienced cultural hegemony. America’s dramatists
have always known this. They have narrativized such knowledge in their
scripts. Therefore, in a performative and tribal sense, much of contemporary
American drama may be regarded as staging myths of rebellion: rebellions
against the self, the other, the primal family unit, or the culture itself. The
confrontations embodied in contemporary plays reflect the playwright’s
responses to a culture whose identity radically transformed itself after World
War II. The spectacles of Adrienne Kennedy, Christopher Durang, or Megan
Terry, like those of their European counterparts, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet,
or Caryl Churchill, not only reflect such transformations but often outline
alternative responses that somehow seem more real in their absurdist or
alogical textures than surface reality itself. The contemporary dramatist’s
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preoccupation with art, artifice, and theatricality reflects his or her essentially moral impulse to impose some form of order upon an age of uncertainty.
For Tennessee Williams by the seventies, imposing some order seemed
problematic at best. Most theatregoers agree that after Night of the Iguana
(1961), his last major success, Williams entered what he himself called his
“stoned age.” To be sure, he continued to write until his death in 1983: he composed at least sixty new plays, though most were never published and many
seldom if ever performed. Such plays as The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here
Anymore (1963), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small Craft Warnings (1972),
Out Cry (1973), Vieux Carré (1977), sparked some popular interest, but the
critics became, with each new play, less impressed. Perhaps The Red Devil
Battery Sign serves as an example of Williams’s declining reputation. At the 18
June 1975 preview run of the play at the Shubert Theatre in Boston, Anthony
Quinn, who played the lead character, King Del Ray, offered free tickets to any
theatregoer who felt he did not get his money’s worth. A reviewer in the
Boston Globe reported that “Director Edwin Sherin appeared on stage and told
the capacity house that what it was going to see was a ‘working rehearsal . . .
Mr. Quinn has asked me to make this explanation to you. If any of you would
prefer to come back at some later time during the run, you are welcome to as
his guests’ . . . No one took up Quinn’s offer . . .” (quoted in Arnott, Tennessee
Williams on File, 61). Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that Kirche, Kuchen und
Kinder (1979) and Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? (1980) were
written by the author of some of America’s most brilliant plays. By the time of
the last plays staged before his death, Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) and
Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), Williams was remembered as a
playwright whose best works appeared between 1945 and 1961. In all fairness
the later Williams is not as bad as the critics tend to think, and recently scholars have argued that the playwright’s language and visual and aural experimentations during his last twenty years provide actors and directors with
unique materials (see Cohn, “The Last Two Decades,” 232–43). Perhaps his
The Notebooks of Trigorin (1996) will rekindle some critical interest. Still, with
such plays as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Night of the Iguana, Williams not only inspired an
entire generation of theatregoers but reinvented as he validated the American
stage.
Re-enter Albee
While Williams’s influence began to fade during and after the sixties, Edward
Albee’s emerged. Few playwrights in the sixties and seventies influenced
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American drama more than Albee. The beneficiary of his American predecessors, O’Neill, Miller, and Williams especially, he also was receptive to
European influences, particularly those of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco,
Peter Handke, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter. Albee would ultimately prove
able to move freely, if uncomfortably, between the alternative environs of the
Off-Broadway theatrical movement and Broadway. While gaining inspiration
from his dramatic forebears here and abroad, Albee also looked ahead,
encouraging and supporting a number of then unknown dramatists –
Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, and Sam Shepard, among others. A playwright more at ease in staging his work on the margins, Albee found himself
at the very epicenter of the American dramatic world.
After dropping out of college in his freshman year, Albee worked for ten
years at a series of odd jobs before composing The Zoo Story (1959), his spectacular first success, as noted in the first section of this chapter. Albee’s influence was especially felt during the sixties, though his reputation faded after
A Delicate Balance (1966) and the inventive companion plays, Box and
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968). Despite winning a Pulitzer for
Seascape (1975), Albee’s dramas since 1970, most theatregoers felt, seemed
more like unfinished experiments whose scripts fell prey to the mimetic
fallacy.
But in the nineties Albee regained his voice in Three Tall Women, a work in
which he draws much from familial experiences; indeed, it seems to be
Albee’s most frankly autobiographical work. It first opened at Vienna’s English
Theatre, Ltd, on 14 June 1991 and, after its 30 July 1992 showing at the Rivers
Arts Repertory in Woodstock, New York, had its New York City premiere on 27
January 1994 at the Vineyard Theatre. As in such earlier works as The Zoo
Story and The American Dream (1961), Three Tall Women replicates uneasy
familial tensions and the playwright’s life-long preoccupation with death. A
Beckettian play, Three Tall Women opens in a well-appointed bedroom in
which three women – named A, B, and C – reflect upon and challenge each
others’ lives. A is the eldest, whose nearness to death seems more pronounced with her props of a sling and walking cane; B appears as a middleaged and acerbic confidant who tends to A; and C is a young, restless, and
hardly supportive attorney.
Clearly approaching her own demise, A launches into a series of verbal
reflections, some bordering on vintage Albee verbal assaults, reflections
dealing with death and dying. She points out the inevitability of death (or, as
B says, “It’s downhill from sixteen on!”), but her conception of death extends
well beyond the physical. Although A appears as a mean-spirited and bigoted
old woman, she also radiates more life than B and C. A recalls a past filled with
loss, a sterile marriage, and a son who cannot reciprocate her love. At the end
of Act One, A’s anguish produces tears and a stroke.
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Throughout his career, Albee has subverted audience expectation, and
Three Tall Women extends this pattern. In Act Two he presents a death watch
scenario, reminiscent of All Over (1971), in which A, bedridden, lies under an
oxygen mask. B, hump-backed and nasty in the first act, appears as a composed and regal woman while C, in pink chiffon, has transformed herself into
a gracious, elegant débutante. However, things turn out to be more complicated than ABC in this play. Albee shifts away from realism to non-realism,
subverting the theatregoers’ sense of objective reality. The three women are
really one woman. A reappears, the figure lying in the bed being a dummy,
allowing the play to blend the three narratives of A, B, and C into one woman
at three different stages of her life – A at ninety, B at fifty-two, and C at twentysix years of age. Although the three women share the same life experiences,
A and B join forces in their opposition to C and in their rejection of illusions.
Deception and betrayal form the greatest illusions, they tell C, forewarning
that her life will be filled with disappointment. The young boy of Act One
appears as the young man now, visiting his dying mother for the last time. All
of the characters, representative of various phases of a single woman’s life,
are haunted by sickness, denials, dying, and ultimately death. Only A accepts
her fate, embraces the reality of her death, affirming that the happiest
moment is “coming to the end of it.” Three Tall Women was inspired by the
memory of Albee’s domineering adoptive mother, with whom he felt little connection. Her arid marriage to a wealthy and submissive father, their marital
battles, and the reluctant son mirror Albee’s own upbringing. Although Albee
claims that he “did not want to write a revenge piece” and “was not interested
in ‘coming to terms’” with his feelings toward his mother, he calls the writing
of the play “an exorcism.” The play is his way of putting in perspective his
mother (and father), who provided material comfort but little love; he also
implies that the play is a reckoning with his own mortality. More tellingly,
Three Tall Women embodies major philosophical issues that have long been
synonymous with each Albee play.
Those issues first surfaced in The Zoo Story, The American Dream, and
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). After Jerry astonished audiences by
impaling himself on a knife in The Zoo Story and Grandma reported with
appalling specificity the spiritual dismemberment of the child in The
American Dream, Albee was either lauded or loathed for his dramatization of
fatal attractions. Verbal challenges, social confrontations, sudden deaths –
real and imagined, physical and psychological – permeate his theatre. From
The Zoo Story through Three Tall Women, his plays address such issues as
betrayal, abandonment, sexual tension, the primacy of communication, loss
of personal ambition, and withdrawal into a death-in-life existence – hardly
issues squaring with the entertainment tastes of a Broadway that beckoned
Albee.
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Given the militancy of his scripts and his penchant for filling his stage world
with self-devouring characters, many critics pigeonhole Albee as a nihilist. It
is a curious label. For Albee’s world view presupposes the talismanic powers
of the theatre to trigger public awareness and private insight. Within the Albee
canon, one can locate an affirmative vision of human experience, a vision that
questions Albee’s reputation as an anger artist. The death-saturated world
Albee creates is undeniably a haunting presence in all of his plays. However,
the internal action, the subtextual dimension of his plays, reveals the playwright’s compassion for his fellow human beings and a deep concern for the
social contract. What Albee calls a “dangerous participation” in human relationships is a necessary correlative to living authentically. Albee has long
argued, in his plays, essays, and interviews, that through the process of
immersing one’s self fully, dangerously, and honestly in daily experience the
individual may sculpt a better polis. For Albee, the play becomes equipment
for living. As The Woman in Listening (1976) recalls, “We don’t have to live, you
know, unless we wish to; the greatest sin, no matter what they tell you, the
greatest sin in living is doing it badly – stupidly, or as if you weren’t really
alive.” In plays as conceptually different as A Delicate Balance (1966) and
Fragments – A Concerto Grosso (1994), Albee implies that one can choose consciously to mix the intellect and the emotion into a new whole, measured qualitatively, which leads to the heightened awareness for which Judith Malina
and Julian Beck yearned during their years with The Living Theatre.
A technically versatile dramatist, Albee demonstrates, often at the cost of
commercial if not critical success, a willingness to explore the ontological
status of theatricality itself. As he writes in his prefatory remarks to two of his
most experimental plays, Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung,
“Since art must move, or wither – the playwright must try to alter the forms
with which his precursors have had to work.” Each Albee play demonstrates
his ongoing effort to reshape dramatic language and contexts.
One of the qualities of recent American drama concerns the importance of
audience participation. Albee remains a leader in asking his audiences to
become active participants in the stage experience. He rejects the notion of
audience as voyeur. Interestingly, the French actor, director, and aesthetician
Antonin Artaud, who described what he called the Theatre of Cruelty, deeply
influenced Albee. For Artaud, the dramatic experience should “disturb the
senses’ repose,” should “unleash the repressed unconscious,” and should
spark “a virtual revolt” (The Theatre and its Double, 16). Cruelty, for Artaud, is
the key alchemical ingredient that generates an apocalyptic revolt within the
audience. Although Artaud and Albee would disagree on many theatrical
issues, they share a belief in the use of violence. “All drama goes for blood in
one way or another,” Albee explains. “If drama succeeds the audience is
bloodied, but in a different way. And sometimes the act of aggression is direct
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or indirect, but it is always an act of aggression. And this is why I try very hard
to involve the audience . . . I want the audience to participate in the dramatic
experience.” More significantly, Albee believes that if the audience participates in the play, the violence and death, paradoxically, become positive elements. As Albee suggests, “the theatre is a live and dangerous experience –
and therefore a life-giving force” (interview with author). His plays embody
what the playwright calls “a personal, private yowl” that “has something to do
with the anguish of us all” (“Preface,” The American Dream).
Like Miller and Williams, Albee believes in the powers of the imagination
and art to create a liberal humanism. Underneath his characters’ public
bravado lies an ongoing inner drama, a subtext that presents his characters’
quests for awareness. The tragic irony and feeling of loss stem from the characters’ inability to understand the regenerative power implicit in self-awareness. If from the perspective of the twenty-first century such a belief seems
clichéd or even shrill, it nevertheless appealed to most theatregoers and
dramatists when Albee emerged as a genuine force in the American theatre in
the sixties and seventies. In brief, Albee’s is an affirmative vision of human
experience. He underscores the importance of confronting O’Neillean “pipedreams,” or illusions. In the midst of a dehumanizing society, Albee’s heroes,
perhaps irrationally, affirm living. If Ionesco’s or Beckett’s characters seem
aware of suffering, they also tend to accept an attitude that precludes any real
moral growth. In contrast, Albee’s heroes suffer and dwell in an absurd world
but realize the opportunity for growth and change. The Albee hero often experiences a coming to consciousness that draws him or her toward “the
marrow,” to allude to a key metaphor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the
essence of human relationships. Such awareness, for Albee, is at once a
deeply personal as well as a deeply political force.
To regard Albee’s use of verbal dueling and death as proof of a nihilistic
vision is to overlook the true source of his theatrical largeness. Throughout
his career, he has defined, as he argues, “how we lie to ourselves and to each
other, how we try to live without the cleansing consciousness of death” (The
Plays, I, 10). To experience the “cleansing” effects of such self-awareness – as
Jerry in The Zoo Story, Grandma in The Sandbox (1960), Tobias in A Delicate
Balance, the Wife in All Over, Charlie in Seascape, Jo in The Lady from Dubuque
(1980), and Jack and Gillian in Marriage Play (1984) discover – has long unified
Albee’s theatre.
Albee may be regarded as a social constructionist. He sees the playwright
as an artist who can destabilize models of communities, expose the inherent
weaknesses they harbor, and through catharsis reconstruct a new model of
community and citizenship. Subordinating pessimism to the possibility
that the individual can communicate honestly with the self and the other,
Albee presents that potential for regeneration, a source of optimism which
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underlies both his sense of social constructionism and his overtly aggressive
text and performance. Jerry’s death in The Zoo Story, for instance, liberates
him from an impossible present and also confirms the vitality of the “teaching emotion” he had discovered earlier. Jerry’s death gives way, in brief, to
nothing less than Peter’s rebirth, a recharging of the spirit. Albee even claims
that “Peter has become Jerry to a certain extent” (interview with author).
Peter and Jerry, like their author, finally have traveled a long distance out of
the way to come back a short distance correctly.
Albee does not limit the recuperative spirit of The Zoo Story to the actors
but extends the benevolent hostility of the play toward the audience. Such a
deliberate attempt to diminish the actor/audience barrier, as he would do
three decades later in The Man Who Had Three Arms (1982), essentializes
Albee’s dramatic theories. When Jerry dies and an absolved Peter exits, Albee
envisions actor and audience as a unified collective, sharing in the emotional
intensity of the action. By successfully mixing pity, fear, and recognition in the
play’s closure, Albee transfers the tragic insight Peter gains to the audience.
Albee emerged at the right place at the right time. His clever dialogues
rekindled an excitement in the American theatre, in the process drawing
attention to the vitality of Off-Broadway theatre. His finest play, however,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opened not Off-Broadway but at the Billy Rose
Theatre. It was a play that checked, if not halted, Broadway’s decline as it ran
before packed houses for 664 performances. Whether in praise or scorn, theatregoers responded. The movie version, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard
Burton, became one of the most lucrative films of 1966 for Warner Bros. and
garnered thirteen Oscar nominations that year. The play remained enormously popular in the sixties and seventies, and today is still regarded as one
of the key works in American dramatic history. Following his Pulitzer Prize for
A Delicate Balance, however, his reputation began to slide.
After some forgettable work – Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1966) and Everything
in the Garden (1968), an adaptation of Giles Cooper’s play, and the inventive
companion pieces, Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, plays
outlining the collapse of language and human contact itself – Albee entered
the seventies with All Over, a drama whose subject matter revolves around
death. Indeed, the reality of death shapes this play, first performed at
Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre on 27 March 1971. Although its working title
was simply Death, All Over reveals the pressures death exerts on the living.
Albee reconnoiters the psychic terrain of the survivors. The play extends that
interest in death seen in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, whose LongWinded Lady laments, “Death is nothing; there . . . there is no death. There is
only life and dying.”
In terms of plot and action, little happens. The characters congregate
around a famous (and never seen) dying man, forming a socially awkward
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death watch. As the play develops, we see that all of the characters have abrogated their own essential selves; their petty deceits and minor betrayals have
grown into death-in-life patterns of behavior. The play ends with the famous
man’s death, but clearly Albee implies that for the characters life has been “all
over” for too long.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s theories on the dying process influenced Albee
while composing All Over. Her On Death and Dying (1969), published two
years before All Over, concerns familial and cultural reactions to death and
traces the psychological stresses the living and the dying experience during
the various stages of the dying process. Among her complex findings she suggests a simple observation that serves, in dramatic terms, as Albee’s point of
departure in All Over as well as The Lady from Dubuque and Three Tall Women:
the dying patient’s problems come to an end, but the family’s problems go on.
Albee’s interest lies well beyond the dying man, for what strikes most forcibly
is the other characters’ predicaments and their responses toward themselves. Their egocentrism clouds judgment; the dying man remains an
afterthought.
In All Over the egocentric preoccupations of the characters so infiltrate
their motives and language that humane values fade, becoming distant social
forces. A special kind of death replaces any humanistic values: not the physical disintegration of the body but the metaphysical dissolution of the individual spirit. Like Bessie in The Death of Bessie Smith (1959), who never takes the
stage, the dying man in All Over remains invisible. Yet, like Bessie Smith, he
asserts his presence throughout the play. His dying, ironically, gives definition
to the others’ lack of vitality. Albee deliberately hides the famous man behind
a screen, the symbolic separator of the dying patient from the living family
members. The screen represents, for Albee as for Kübler-Ross, a disturbing
cultural distancing response, a way to deny an unwanted otherness. Finally,
Albee reinforces the inactive spirit of the characters by having them perform
as if they were partially anesthetized, sleepwalking through their lives.
Throughout the play Albee refers to a dream world, the central problem of All
Over revolving around the moral sleep that so engaged Thoreau and, later,
Bellow. Such a relinquishment of the spirit is, for Albee, unacceptable. The
playwright will rethink some of the larger issues embedded in All Over in each
of his subsequent plays, especially with Seascape.
If the collapse of moral nerve forms a central problem in Albee’s work
through Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, then death has
informed his work since All Over. Seascape, which opened on 26 January 1975
at New York’s Sam S. Shubert Theatre, and which won Albee his second
Pulitzer Prize, represents the dramatist’s persistent concern with the consequences of an attenuated human spirit. Here Albee is not writing merely
about the naturalistic evolution of the human and animal species, but about
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the evolution of human consciousness itself. This sentimental play, a not
always convincing mixture of fairy tale, myth, and history, nonetheless
appears as one of Albee’s more optimistic works.
A companion to All Over, Seascape was originally entitled Life. The design
of the play seems simple enough. Nancy and Charlie are vacationing at the
beach, relaxing and contemplating their shrinking future. When two tall greenscaled sea lizards emerge from the sea, conveniently anthropomorphized,
Albee joins two distinct worlds, the human and the animal world. Whereas in
so many Albee plays such a conjunction leads to violence and death, in
Seascape the comingling underscores the force of love. Its product is understanding rather than illusion. Things are not “all over” in this play. Albee, if
nothing else, implies that through the sweep and play of evolutionary patterns, humankind has aspired to rationality. The danger, however, is that the
triumph of rationality may dissipate the primordial life-force, at least in the
case of Charlie.
Albee’s next plays, Listening, commissioned as a radio play for BBC Radio
Three in 1976, and Counting the Ways, staged at the National Theatre in
London in 1976, went largely unnoticed in the United States, as did Finding the
Sun (1983) and Marriage Play (1987). His lackluster adaptation of Nabokov’s
Lolita in 1981 was critically scorned. The Lady from Dubuque (1980) and The
Man Who Had Three Arms drew mainly negative responses and quickly closed
after feeble showings at the ticket office while Fragments – A Concerto Grosso
(1994) received mixed reviews and closed virtually unnoticed.
If his work since Seascape lacks the theatricality of the earlier plays, he still
ranks as one of the most influential American playwrights since 1960. When
he is at his best, Albee produces, in his characters and audience alike, what
Robert Frost calls “a momentary stay against confusion” (Complete Poems,
vi), a still point amidst the confusions of life, a heightened sense of self and
moral responsibility. The plays may seem overburdened with death, but it is
precisely the presence of death which charges life with significance. Albee
received his third Pulitzer Prize for Three Tall Women in 1994. The only other
dramatist to win more was O’Neill.
Sam Shepard
Albee has always enjoyed helping other artists as they begin their careers. By
writing a favorable review of Icarus’s Mother in a 25 November 1965 issue of
the Village Voice, Albee, then the most influential theatre voice in New York
City, called attention to the then unknown Sam Shepard, whose career immediately took off, though in a direction that differed from Albee’s.
If Albee and Arthur Miller ultimately outline a belief in moral optimism,
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Shepard reconnoiters a mythic and social terrain touched at first with absurdity if also with humor. True West (1980), for instance, a play about family disconnection and illusory impulses, verges at times almost on farce or
vaudeville while retaining a sense of menace. Relationships in Shepard’s plays
are deeply problematic, those between men and women in Seduced (1978) and
Fool for Love (1983), or between parents and children in Curse of the Starving
Class (1977) or Buried Child (1979). A similar pattern reappears in Simpatico
(1994) and in States of Shock (1991), in which a crippled son, a victim of an
artillery blast, kills his pro-military father. In Sam Shepard’s entropic world,
the primal family unit itself becomes a lie of the mind.
Shepard’s protagonists struggle to survive in an American landscape
warped by its own deflected myths and generational schisms. His career
began as American society itself came under pressure with Kennedy’s assassination, the escalating war in Southeast Asia, and the emerging Civil Rights
Movement. Competing narratives gained increasing authority. Race riots and
anti-war marches challenged normative values. American hegemony had disappeared.
Sam Shepard’s characters, preoccupied with survival and propelled by an
inchoate inertia, seem less concerned with social change than private visions
and public myths in a world filled with the iconography of popular culture.
Cowboys, rock musicians, Hollywood agents, military personnel, drifters, and
mobsters enact their repressed anxieties and depressed lives amidst the
alluvia of a postmodernist set and setting. His plays take place in shabby
motels and in suburbia, with empty refrigerators, ’57 Chevys, nearby shopping malls, or deserts defining an arid world devoid of comfort. Rock’n’roll
music or Western films, integral elements to many of his plays, familiar to the
audience, become alien and disconcerting in performance. Within such a
world his characters struggle, unsuccessfully, to find some authentic force. As
Lee says in True West, “What I need is somethin’ authentic. Somethin’ to keep
me in touch.”
In 1963 Shepard, a nineteen-year-old engaged in an on-the-road adventure
from his California home, wound up in New York City where he was working
as a busboy at the Village Gate, a popular jazz club, “cleaning up dishes and
bringing Nina Simone ice” (quoted in Mottram, Inner Landscapes, 8). The
young Shepard thrived in New York’s East Village. Heavily influenced by the
Beat poets, jazz musicians, and an emerging Off-Off Broadway, Shepard turned
his energies to playwriting. Indeed, he proved to be an energetic new playwright, one sometimes unable to control his creative energies. Later in his
career Shepard would carefully rewrite his scripts, but his early plays seem
more like unfinished impressionistic pieces, the product of an imagination
that disdained revision. He also proved receptive to international innovations
in drama, and his earliest plays, from The Rock Garden (1964) to Back Bog
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Beast Bait (1971), reflect such receptivity. The earlier plays tend to be brief,
non-realistic pieces, often filled with fantastic twists of narrative and lacking
closure. Traditional versions of plot, character, and linearity find little place.
Shepard’s plays were rebellions against established notions of dramatic form
and structure. From Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot influenced his aesthetic
principles, Shepard borrowed, for his Cowboys (1964) and The Rock Garden, a
sense of the absurd, an implied futility in any logical connection between
words, actions, and deeds. As his career developed, Shepard benefited from
other European Absurdists. From Pinter, he inherited a sense of tragicomedic
menace. From Handke he derived a sense of the artificiality of the theatre,
which in turn allowed him to move more readily from the real to the dream,
from the familiar realistic props and settings to a symbolic and even mythic
representation. In Pirandello he found a playfulness that darkens as his own
postmodern characters search for their identities. From Artaud he drew the
power of the sacred, the violent, and the mythic. Although little evidence
exists to suggest that these Europeans directly influenced Shepard, as a
young, emerging artist, living in the Village, he could hardly help but be caught
in international artistic cross-currents.
On native ground, Sam Shepard also learned from the free associative
forms of Beat poetry. He embraced the improvisatorial aspects of a free language, a word play liberated from rigid structures of meter and logical coherence. The poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg appealed to his
verbal imagination, as did Jack Kerouac’s “oceanic” prose in On the Road
(1957). A rock musician who would later in his career became a film star,
Shepard was also drawn to the improvisational forms of jazz music. His association with Joseph Chaikin and Megan Terry, and his involvement in the work
of the Open Theatre in the mid-sixties, gave Shepard a chance to move his
instinctive experimentalism from the page to the stage.
Shepard began the seventies with Operation Sidewinder (1970), his first and
ill-fated foray to a mainstream venue, Lincoln Center. He filled the stage with
thirty-nine characters and a six-foot electronic snake. A prefatory note to the
actors of Angel City (1976) captures the metatheatrical quality of his work:
“The term ‘character’ could be thought of in a different way when working on
this play. Instead of the idea of a ‘whole character’ with logical motives behind
his behavior which the actor submerges himself into, he should consider
instead a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the
central theme. In other words, more in terms of collage construction or jazz
improvisation.” Even the names of his characters alert audiences to a different kind of theatre: Galactic Jack in The Tooth of Crime (1972), Old Oraibi in
Operation Sidewinder, Slim, Cavale, and Lobster Man in Cowboy Mouth (1971),
Mazon in Killer’s Head (1975), Shooter in Action (1975), Tympani and Lanx
in Angel City, and Stubbs in States of Shock (1991). Such names indicate the
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territory in which he works. In The Mad Dog Blues, Kosmo and Yahoodi
encounter none other than Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Captain Kidd, Paul
Bunyan, Jesse James, and the Ghost Girl, who comes from a South Sea island.
These non-traditional plays with alternative settings used a form, language,
and timbre that spoke to a newer generation of theatregoers. Shepard provided a fresh alternative. His early success stemmed from his ability to
capture the attention of that newer generation of theatregoers, especially
those increasingly drawn to the language and music of rock’n’roll.
Within a year of his first works being staged, no fewer than six Shepard
plays were performed at various small theatres in New York City, and by the
seventies Shepard’s career was fully launched. The Tooth of Crime, staged at
the Open Space Theatre in London on 17 July 1972, pits the aging Hoss, who
fancies himself to be a rock’n’roll king, against his youthful nemesis, Crow.
One of the best of Shepard’s earlier plays, The Tooth of Crime presents an ageold conflict in classical mythic form. As Oedipus struggled with the fundamental Sophoclean question, “Who am I?”, so Hoss struggles with his own
modern version of self-scrutiny and self-revelation. However, whereas
Oedipus’s pursuit of the truth ultimately leads to self-perception, Shepard’s
Hoss revels in the ambiguity of the truth/illusion matrix. “You may think
every picture you see is a true history of the way things used to be or the
way things are,” Hoss sings in the play’s opening scene, “ . . . So here’s another
illusion to add to your confusion . . .” He finishes the song, a modern-day invocation, a prologue inviting the audience to enter the world of art and artifice,
by announcing: “So here’s another fantasy/About the way things seem to be
to me.” That things are not the way they seem quickly becomes clear when
Hoss’s image of himself clashes with the reality. Obsessed with recording a
rock’n’roll hit that will propel him to the top of the music charts, Hoss is a
performer of a different sort, a murderer who heads a futuristic interstellar
gang. He agonizes throughout the first act over his diminishing musical
prowess, determined at all costs to maintain his control, his superiority over
all rivals. To dodge a tragic fate, he reasons, he must transcend his suffering
and confront Crow, who, like a rival gangster, moves in on his turf to claim his
identity.
The second act thus presents Hoss’s endgame. He feels compelled to go
beyond the “code” of conduct enforced by the Keepers, a group of outsiders
functioning as a type of cosmic Mafia gang. Despite warnings from his associates – Becky, Star-Man, Galactic Jack, and Cheyenne – Hoss feels compelled
to move from the “inside” to the “outside,” from the world confined by strict
“codes” of behavior to an outer world in which he may redefine himself musically by breaking the rules, by creating a new music that will ensure his popularity. His associates warn that life “outside” has so changed that Hoss will
fail to recognize the perils of this more complex, futuristic world, but Hoss
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argues, “The game can’t contain a true genius . . . We don’t have the whole
picture.”
Hoss is fated to lose the battle with Crow. As he observes, “You tricked me.
You wanna trade places with me? You had this planned right from the start.”
The key to Crow’s usurpation lies precisely in the thing Hoss cannot do: adapt.
Hoss remains locked, and therefore doomed, in a past image of himself as a
rock star. He cannot change. His code of behavior is out of touch with a more
contemporary reality. Crow thrives on a capacity to change, to adapt his
image to fit the latest trend. Realizing that he no longer harmonizes with either
his audience or his music, Hoss performs his final show as the “true killer” he
fancies himself to be. Denied the control of self and image that he so craved
in life, Hoss concedes defeat. His suicide becomes the ultimate show, the last
way for him to live his life outside the “code,” a code that long ago left the
aging star in its afterwash. Shepard underscores Hoss’s impotence when all
but Cheyenne embrace the new king, Crow.
Shepard suggests in “Language, Visualization, and the Inner Library” that
the emotional impact of myths taps a universal, visceral response with the
actor and spectator alike: “Myth speaks to everything all at once, especially
the emotions” (217). In Seduced the myth he explores is that of the American
dream, according to Arthur Miller, a fundamental concern of the American
writer.
In Seduced, Henry Hackamore is a theatricalized version of Howard Hughes,
one of America’s more celebrated and enigmatic cultural icons and the ultimate embodiment of wealth, power, and perversity. The opening scene establishes Henry’s eccentricities. With Randy Newman’s “Sail Away” as
background music, he meticulously covers his body with Kleenex. He is
deeply paranoid. When Luna, one of Henry’s former lovers, comes to his
Mexican compound at his summons, she surrenders her purse, lest it conceal
weapons with which to murder him.
In his misanthropy, Henry plays out the fractured inner reality of a
deranged consciousness, a consciousness not so much aligned with a human
being as with an object, with some part belonging to the wreckage of a cultural landscape. The physical geography of the land turns to the inner geography of this dreamer, Henry Hackamore: “Look at it growing! Hotels! Movies!
Airplanes! Oil! Las Vegas! Look at Las Vegas, Raul! It’s glowing in the dark . . .
I’m the demon they invented! Everything they ever aspired to. The nightmare
of the nation! It’s me, Raul! Only me!” Shepard presents a Hackamore who, as
Joan Didion reminds us, slouches toward his Bethlehem, Las Vegas, a fitting
symbol of an American wasteland. Despite Henry’s enormous wealth and a
seemingly regal command of power and action, he lacks true action and
energy. Raul, it turns out, will not help Henry. Luna and Miami, seductive
dream figures from the past, stand as mere objects, creations of a warped
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imagination and, as such, incapable of comforting one so disconnected from
the self and the other. Thus Henry, billionaire manipulator, exploiter, and
recluse, ironically becomes an object subjugated to external forces. The
American Dream, in short, seduces, betrays, and rapes Henry: “I was taken by
the dream and all the time I thought I was taking it. It was a sudden seduction.
Abrupt. Almost like rape. You could call it rape. I gave myself up. Sold it all
down the river.” Indeed, rape takes on a symbolic energy in the play, as
Shepard defines it in terms of sexual, social, and cultural intercourse.
Seduced closes with Raul’s betrayal of Henry. Forcing the eccentric billionaire to sign over all assets, he blasts Henry with a pistol, Shepard’s last rape
symbol. But Henry does not die. Instead, he ends the drama with a haunting
monody, “I’m dead to the world but I never been born,” a testimony to the illusory resilience of the American Dream myth, destructive or denatured as it
may be. With waist-length white hair, five-inch finger nails, and wearing only
boxer shorts, Henry’s appearance, alone, visually accentuates his freakishness. Even the play’s set, with its walls that symbolically entrap the characters, works on the level of theme: they function, like Robert Frost’s walls, as
dividers, separators that keep Hackamore walled up, sealed from any authentic human exchange. Indeed, unseen presences and felt absences fuel Henry’s
paranoia throughout the play.
While Shepard’s non-realism in many respects reached its apex with
Seduced in 1978, as early as 1974 he had voiced an interest in developing a
more realistic theatre. “I’d like to try a whole different way of writing now,
which is very stark and not so flashy and not full of a lot of mythic figures and
everything, and try to scrape it down to the bone as much as possible.”
Shepard’s realism, however, was “not the kind of realism where husbands and
wives squabble and that kind of stuff” (“Metaphors,” 208). His remarks slightly
mislead. Husbands and wives “squabble” in most of his later plays, with
fighting reaching its height in A Lie of the Mind. Yet his comments do indicate
a modified realism that informs the later plays. Beginning in 1977 with Curse
of the Starving Class, and extending through Fool for Love, Shepard experimented with that attenuated realism, a form that also informs, but does not
define, the 1991 States of Shock and the 1994 Simpatico. In terms of plot, characterization, and language, these plays were more realistic than the works of
the sixties and earlier seventies. Yet for all that the real is still put under pressure, warped by psychological needs, deformed by internal and external pressures.
The changeover to a modified realistic mode may be seen in what Shepard
has called his “family trilogy.” Curse of the Starving Class concerns a family
whose members are forever destined, biologically, to remain blood relations,
but a “curse” infects this family, a pestilence that goes well beyond heredity
and genetics. Economically and socially, psychologically and spiritually,
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Weston and Ella and their offspring remain forever doomed, fated to be
entrapped in overbearing relationships, dependent on each other even
though such dependency leads toward violence and destruction.
Father and son, mother and daughter address one another, but their
actions suggest that they exist in their own parallel worlds. The characters
live according to their own agendas. They are insular and isolated figures.
Each plays a tragic part in the decay of this family. Family life, in this play, is
filled with violence and repressed desires. Weston, the father and a drunk,
wants to sell the family’s home. Ella, the mother, schemes to do the same thing
– without telling her husband. Father and mother, separately, seek escape.
Near the end the father says to Wesley, his son: “You couldn’t be all that starving! We’re not that bad off, goddamnit!” He is wrong, of course. This family is
so starved of psychological and spiritual sustenance that they have become
half-demented figures unaware of their dementia. They often gaze into a refrigerator which contains, like the refrigerator in Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother
(1982), little nourishing food. It becomes yet another symbolic reminder of
the “starving class” to which this family belongs. Emma, the daughter who
experiences her first period during the play and thus considers herself cursed
by her mother, feels so lost that, just before the play ends, she announces, “I’m
gone. I’m gone! Never to return”; Wesley assumes the role of the father after
Weston, faced with debt and menaced by Emerson and Slater, two hustlers
who blow up the family car, abandons his own family. Ella and Wesley at the
final curtain reconstruct “that story” Weston “used to tell about that eagle,” a
story capturing the impossible nature of one-on-one relationships for this
family. The eagle and the cat allusion concerns the death of the two animals
whose predatory instincts led them to fight to their deaths. Metaphorically,
the members of this family remain, like the eagle and the cat, fatally entwined,
forever unable to free themselves from their kin.
Shepard followed the Obie Award-winning Curse of the Starving Class with
the second work in the family trilogy, Buried Child, a play also featuring a
family whose members are fatally entwined, and which garnered Shepard his
first Pulitzer Prize. Buried Child is about metaphoric and psychological abuse.
First staged at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco on 27 June 1978, Buried
Child ostensibly charts the life of a “normal” midwestern farm family, with the
grandfather and grandmother, Dodge and Halie, presiding over their brood.
At the start of Act Two, Shelly, Vince’s girlfriend, cannot believe that his
family’s house seems so normal: “It’s like a Norman Rockwell cover or something.” Once Shelly enters the home, however, she learns that the exterior
facade of the house masks a house of repressed horrors. Despite its realistic
trappings, Buried Child works within an altogether different, non-realistic
atmosphere. When Shelly initially sees Dodge, with butchered, bloody scalp,
the abnormality of this family stuns her. Dodge simply glares at her. For most
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of the play, Dodge, while sneaking sips of whiskey, stares blankly at the television, its flickering blue lights emblematic of the mental vacuity of the entire
family. Halie constantly harangues Dodge and is having an affair, it appears,
with the local minister. Their sons are terrible extensions of a bizarre family,
the genetic lineage carried on with devastating efficiency and symmetry.
Tilden, the eldest, a former All-American fullback, now appears mentally
unstable. That instability finds its fraternal parallel in Bradley, the younger
brother, physically handicapped after accidently cutting off his leg with a
chain saw. They talk of their other brother, Ansel, a former high-school basketball star (or so Halie claims), who had died years before in war (not on the
battlefield but in a motel room). Vince seems nothing more than a stranger, an
intruder into his own home. No wonder many critics have called Buried Child
an American gothic, for it remains a fable about incest, murder, and the abrogation of individual spirit and social accountability.
Like those in Curse of the Starving Class, the family members in Buried Child
experience the pressures of a dimly perceived “curse.” They are victims of
what Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms (1929) called a “biological trap.” The
play gains its cultural and theatrical power from several sources, but the most
engaging concerns the murdered child, whose very existence and subsequent
fate Shepard only slowly reveals. Shelly could hardly realize how bizarre the
answer must be to her initial question, “What’s happened to this family
anyway?” Halie’s later comment hints at the tabooed nature of the answer as
she refers to “the stench of sin in this house.” This pervades every gesture;
the “stench of sin,” indeed, becomes a palpable force around which Shepard’s
gothic story revolves.
Shepard works carefully to connect the sins of the past with the crimes of
the present and future. Dodge and Halie pass on their curses, their secret, and
their sin to their remaining sons, Tilden and Bradley. The Oedipal dimensions
of the play are clear. Specifically, Shepard implies that the buried child is the
product of an incestuous relationship between Tilden and his mother, Halie.
The buried child and the buried truths of the past, repressed through years
of denial, rejection, and indifference, are, ironically, the only unifying factors
in an otherwise dislocated family. Love is an absent voice in Buried Child, isolation the norm. Denial becomes both a source of comfort and anguish. A
willed ignorance preserves this family.
The family farm, barren for decades, now mysteriously yields crops, a sign,
some critics have suggested, of replenishment. For some, the point seems
reinforced by the play’s ending, with Vince transforming into the new patriarch of the family, the inheritor of his grandparents’ land, which now absorbs
a “Good hard rain.” This reading remains unconvincing, however, since
Shepard ironizes the context: the fertile vegetation, after all, has been fertilized by the corpse of a murdered child whose very birth is the byproduct of
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an incestuous relationship. In a perverse effort to preserve the family reputation, Dodge has killed and buried the baby. This family is broken, fractured
physically, mentally, and morally. The curse must be passed on, symbolized
unambiguously when, at the play’s end, Vince assumes (literally and figuratively) the father’s role after Dodge dies. Dodge has been symbolically buried
and spiritually dead throughout the play. Now, after his literal death, his
grandson lies on the sofa, a visual replica of Dodge. When the play closes with
Tilden carrying the corpse of the buried child, it is clear that, for this family,
there can be no escape from their past actions. Shepard offers no neat solution to this gothicized murder mystery. No character atones for his or her
sins; no Sophoclean expiation results. Only Shelly, an outsider, escapes this
family’s tabooed ancestral history.
Shepard continued to examine the American family and its fate in True
West, the third play of the family trilogy that opened, under the direction of
Robert Woodruff, at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco on 10 July 1980. The
focus turns to two brothers, Austin and Lee, whose competing narratives converge in a fraternal duel that ends with menace, apocalypse, and possibly a
fratricidal endgame as the play’s final tableau leaves them trapped in a desertlike landscape, a haunting silhouette of brotherly warring. This final image
provides a key to the play. For no resolution is offered at the end of True West,
simply a family incapable of listening, understanding, or loving. Like the eagle
and the cat in Curse of the Starving Class, Lee and Austin must both fight to the
end if either is to survive.
Shepard energizes the play by contrasting the differing worlds of Austin
and Lee. Austin is in his early thirties and dresses conservatively. He has come
to his mother’s home, located in a suburb near Los Angeles, to get away from
the distractions of family life, to concentrate on his latest Hollywood scriptwriting project and to take care of the house. With an Ivy League education
and a natural reserve, Austin appears to be a young professional. Articulate
and adjusted, he seems rooted in family and business life. By contrast, Lee,
some ten years older, uneducated, and with rotting teeth, wears filthy clothes.
Like their never-seen father, he is a wanderer seeking the “true West” beyond
civilization. A drifter-turned-thief, Lee, upon an unexpected visit to his
mother’s house, cases her neighborhood for televisions to steal. Inarticulate,
a misfit, he seems as rootless and disconnected from family and social world
as Austin is secured to that world. Lee feels abandoned, lost. He has a worldweariness about him. He steals, perhaps, to lay claim to a control otherwise
denied him.
As it turns out, Lee steals much more than television sets. The play begins
with Austin trying to write and Lee sitting on the kitchen counter, beer in
hand. Lee’s surprise entrance sets into motion a brotherly conflict; by the
play’s end the brothers become contestants for each other’s very identity.
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16. San Francisco’s Magic Theatre’s 1981 production of Sam Shepard’s True West with
Jim Haynie as Lee and (in background) Ebbe Roe Smith as Austin. Photograph by Allen
Nomura. Courtesy of Magic Theatre.
Just as Vince assumes the role of Dodge in Buried Child, and Crow of Hoss in
The Tooth of Crime, so Lee becomes Austin. Austin’s identity begins to merge
with Lee’s, and Lee’s with Austin’s. The transformation begins when Lee
decides to write his own screen play.
Lee’s film idea seems outrageous to Austin while his inexperience and
ignorance of the Hollywood film industry seem to preclude his participation.
Yet when Saul Kimmer, a Hollywood producer, agrees to buy Lee’s story of the
true West (a story inspired by Lee’s love of Hollywood Westerns, no less), the
brotherly rivalry takes an ominous turn. Lee has suddenly gained control, but
must rely on Austin’s writing abilities to articulate his fiction. Austin, needing
to maintain Hollywood connections, acquiesces, and types the script for his
brother. The play, then, explores the dissolution of individual identity, as the
brothers slowly exchange roles. Awkwardly at first, but then with an emerging clarity, the brothers undergo a psychic transplant, their role exchanges
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animating the stage. As Lee becomes the successful writer, Austin transforms
into a successful thief, stealing toasters from the neighbors. As the inarticulate Lee objectifies his Hollywood script, Austin becomes more savage and
disheveled, a drunken blathering man. In short, he becomes like his brother.
Further, Shepard fills the action of each of the nine scenes of the play with the
threat of violence, which begins with the verbal jest, finds its more menacing
expression with a physical slap, and culminates in the climactic fight scene.
Metaphoric abuse vies with actual abuse. Hence Lee’s early remarks about
“what kinda’ people kill each other the most” intensifies the mood of violence,
as it foreshadows the murderous impulses that the audience will presently
witness. In Shepard’s depleted American family, the “real” finds its authenticity in killing. Resolutions and clarifications may only be found through death
or the threat of death.
Shepard works carefully to stage the exchange of the brothers’ personalities. At the end of the first act Lee remarks to his brother, “I always wondered
what’d be like to be you”; moments later Austin confesses, “I used to say to
myself, ‘Lee’s got the right idea. He’s out there in the world and here I am.
What am I doing?’” Early in the second act, with tensions building and each
brother slowly dissolving into the psychic identity of the other, Lee says, “You
sound just like the old man now,” to which Austin replies: “Yeah, well we all
sound alike when we’re sloshed. We just sorta’ echo each other.” These telling
exchanges, staged with a rhythmic, incantatory quality, foreshadow the submerging, merging, and restructuring of filial identities. True West concerns
much more than two brothers on a fatal encounter. It also raises questions
about individual, familial, and cultural identity, as it does about the relationship between art and artifice, fiction and reality, and, ultimately, about the
mythicized West versus the “true West.”
Buried Child is, at its core, a symbolic homecoming, and much the same
may be said of True West. The play gains its extraordinary theatrical qualities
precisely through the transforming and transfiguring capacities of the imaginative self. Lee and Austin, inadequate creators separately, team up to
produce a mythicized script that more closely approximates the true West.
Their collective effort is equally an alliance that gives them, together, a creativity that eluded them prior to their merger. Each brother was an artist
devoid of artistry. Now they are capable of producing a script that has, for
Saul Kimmer at least, a ring of truth about it.
However, Shepard subverts the authority of Austin and Lee’s collaborative
script. Though Lee thinks he articulates a “true story,” and, ironically enough,
its authenticity stems from his own gritty experiences of being a societal
outcast, he, like his brother before him, panders to the B-movie tastes of Saul
Kimmer. Like the Hollywood film men in Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow (1988) and
Arthur Kopit’s Bone-the-Fish (1989; revised as Road to Nirvana in 1990), Saul
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concerns himself with making serious money, not true art. Shepard ironizes
the relationship between life and art to such an extent that apprehending the
“true West” remains impossible. The double nature of the brothers’ scriptwriting effort (the impulse to make it real, which immediately makes it false) leads
to increased divisions within this family, the individual, and creativity itself.
But the nature of the brothers’ identities leads to what Shepard calls a divisive “double nature,” a split that reveals the fractured and fracturing psyche.
Living with this double nature, however, proves nearly impossible for the
brothers. They must live in a West denuded of its mythic resonances, drained
of its power to nurture the imagination and, by extension, the culture itself.
As Austin says, “There’s no such thing as the West anymore! It’s a dead issue!”
Instead, the true West has been supplanted by the freeways, malls, and synthetic green grass ringing Mom’s home. If for Lee the true West has its basis
in a Kirk Douglas Western, Lonely Are the Brave, for Austin it finds its expression in the city life he deals with everyday: “I drive on the freeway everyday.
I swallow the smog. I watch the news in color, I shop in the Safeway. I’m the
one who’s in touch! Not him!”
Austin is both right and wrong. The paradox surfaces when the script Lee
constructs, and which his brother dutifully records, strains credibility. Austin
claims that Lee’s plot falsifies experience. But for Shepard’s characters, life
imitates art. Lee’s film idea not only mirrors Lonely Are the Brave, but also
echoes the problematic relationship between the brothers.
Shepard accentuates the disconnected state of this family when, near the
end, the mother appears. Her entrance is absurdly humorous, underlining
Shepard’s fondness for mixing realistic sets with surreal behavior. Returning
from an Alaska vacation to a home that has been trashed by her sons, she
sleepwalks through the house, surveying her dead plants. Her last lines –
voiced as she eyes the wreckage that used to be her kitchen and as her sons
engage in mortal combat – underscore the absurdity of her homecoming: “I
don’t recognize it at all.” Finding a true home, like finding a true West, remains
problematic for Shepard’s rootless characters. The absent father appropriately remains in the desert. The brothers turn the kitchen, now filled with
broken toasters, burnt toast, shattered bottles, and a smashed typewriter,
into a psychological killing field. By the play’s end, they come close to fulfilling Lee’s earlier prophecy of fratricide. The violence, barely held in check
throughout the play, can no longer be contained.
Such physical, psychological, and spiritual violence continues in Fool for
Love, which opened at the Magic Theatre on 8 February 1983, under Shepard’s
direction. In this play, Eddie and Mae, half-siblings fathered by the same man,
find themselves hopelessly in love with each other. Attraction, however,
seems balanced by repulsion. Eddie and Mae’s opening dialogue suggests the
dizzying give and take of their relationship. Comfort mingles with violence.
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These are lovers who one moment indulge in passionate kisses and the next
in deadly threats. Mae, indeed, represents a new Shepard female: one who
holds her ground. Like Albee’s George and Martha, Eddie and Mae emerge as
equal competitors. The equality of their strong wills, matched by their equally
strong neuroses, creates the tension in this play about relationships.
Incestuously united, the two lovers recreate a ritualized courtship, while their
father, described as the Old Man, who exists only in their minds, presides over
the drama, gradually revealing the details of his own death and his wife’s
suicide. Eddie, Mae, and the Old Man each voice their own interpretations of
the past, offering variants on what may or may not have occurred.
Despite the violence, and beyond the humor, Fool for Love differs from the
preceding family plays in its hints at the potentially redemptive as well as
reifying nature of love. As in Savage/Love (1979), Fool for Love points toward
some guarded hope for the future. That hope, however, seems likely to prove
as elusive as the love Eddie and Mae so crave.
Whatever hope might be detectable in Fool for Love dissolves in A Lie of the
Mind, however. Directed by Shepard and first performed at the Promenade
Theater in New York City on 5 December 1985, A Lie of the Mind returns to a
brutalizing world. Connections between men and women prove not only
impossible but decidedly treacherous and vicious. Familiar Shepard patterns
and motifs resurface. An alcoholic and absent father, spacey mothers,
deranged children, surreal atmospheric sets, and the use of music and violence infiltrate the play.
A Lie of the Mind dissects two families. One consists of parents Baylor and
Meg, and sister and brother Beth and Mike. After arriving from Montana to
care for their savagely beaten daughter, Baylor seems more concerned with
his livestock and hunting than with his daughter. He is the frontier man whose
frontier spirit long ago dissipated. Meg is the caring and ineffectual mother,
while Mike assumes the role of the avenger, hunting down his sister’s assailant. The other family seems equally incapable of dealing with objective
reality. Lorraine, the abandoned mother, could be the sister of Mom in True
West, albeit a more articulate and fleshed-out version. After being deserted by
her husband (she keeps his remains in a leather box under her son’s bed), she
formulates her own definition of love: “Love. Whata crock a’ shit.” Her
husband, like the absent father in True West, had died in a drunken haze, the
victim of his own delusions and, perhaps, patricide. From Sally’s viewpoint,
“Jake had decided to kill him,” although Lorraine claims that he was “run over
by a truck in the middle of a Mexican highway.” Brothers Jake and Frankie
echo Austin and Lee from True West. These troubled and troubling families are
thus drawn together in A Lie of the Mind, Shepard’s most savage play.
The most obvious instance of savage love occurs at the beginning of the
play. Jake, speaking frantically on the phone, confesses to beating his wife to
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death. In fact, the brain-damaged Beth survives, although her wounds are so
severe that, like Anna in Susan Yankowitz’s Night Sky (1991), an aphasic
patient, she is forced to relearn language. Half-crazed, she convalesces in a
hospital in Los Angeles.
A reductive imagery dominates the play. Members of these two families are
reduced to infantile states, their regressive patterns of behavior reinforced by
illusory rationalizations. Beth’s brain injuries diminish her communicative
abilities, and she speaks not merely in broken sentences but the tones and language of a young girl. Given Beth’s condition, such behavior seems entirely
understandable, but the infantile behavior also extends to other members of
the family, who are as emotionally maimed as Beth is physically injured. While
Frankie and Sally hold out for coherence and resolution, the others revel in
their own lies of the mind. Jake, horrified by his murderous impulses, retreats
to his boyhood room, complete with model airplanes and a mother who tries
to spoon-feed him broccoli soup.
Regression, indeed, seems a central trope as the vestiges of civilization are
slowly stripped away. Instinct triumphs over reason, the savage over the civilized. The fundamental tool of communication, language itself, is rendered
inadequate, deceptive, lethal. Below the level of rationality, however, beyond
the capacity of language to communicate, is a truth about human nature and
the relationship between men and women too painful to be acknowledged.
Hence the necessary lie of the mind.
During the course of this three-act episodic play, Shepard works with a
number of telling images, the most dominating of which concern animals.
Indeed, bestial references saturate the performance. Allusions to goats,
mules, buffalo, roosters, antelopes, dogs, tigers, rabbits, horses, snakes, and
deer abound. More importantly, Shepard presents his characters as hunters,
the ones who subjugate or slaughter most of these animals. Shepard, himself
an avid hunter, repeatedly links the plight of these various animals with the
play’s characters. Just as Jake hunts down Beth, so Mike tracks Jake. Just as
Jake stalks his father, so Baylor hunts Frankie, and so on. Minutes into the
action Frankie reminds Jake that, as a child, he “kicked the shit out of that goat
you loved so much when she stepped on your bare feet while you were tryin’
to milk her,” a pattern born of a personality that erupts again in his assault on
Beth, whom he still loves. Baylor, self-appointed “dumb rancher,” worries
more about getting his mules to the fairgrounds than seeing to his own daughter’s needs; near the end, he again refers to his obsession with hunting and
animals, a way to keep social or familial duty at arm’s length. Though he professes a rugged individualism, he is as immobilized as his daughter. Moments
later he cannot even put his own socks over his frozen, bloodied feet.
Shepard often describes the characters as “stray” dogs, or dogs “with their
hackles up.” In a chilling scene, Lorraine recounts how her husband had been
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“busted open like a road dog” by a speeding truck; Sally, their daughter, recalls
him snarling at her “just like a dog. Just exactly like a crazy dog. I saw it in his
eyes. This deep, deep hate that came from somewhere far away. It was pure,
black hate with no purpose.” Similarly, when Sally recounts Jake’s involvement in his father’s death, she describes how he “ran like a wild colt and never
looked back.” As in his earlier plays, the curse of fathers passes to their sons.
A Lie of the Mind is Shepard’s most predatory play. It ends while a bewildered Meg, whose husband has just kissed her for the first time in two
decades, gazes at a fire that Lorraine has ignited in the house. Just as the
woods had been blazing for years in Miller’s Loman family home, so the “fire
in the snow” has long been smoldering, if not raging, for these characters.
They dwell in what Lorraine calls a “Christless world.” In such a brutal and
mutable environment, individual identities change, mutate, dissolve, and
merge with others. Meg insists that “Beth’s got male in her” and that “She was
like a deer,” metaphorically linking the predatory instincts of the male hunters
in this play with the ultimate kill, Beth herself. When Mike proudly carries in
“the severed hindquarters of a large buck with the hide still on it,” the butchered
deer stands as a metaphor for Beth’s state of being and, by extension, the
states of mind of all the play’s characters. Within the inverted logic of the
action, then, the animal imagery pushes plot and story to its inevitable end.
The love between Jake and Beth continues, but its original binding power
fades after Jake’s assault. In effect we see the dismemberment of Jake and
Beth. The rootless characters gaze, as does Jake, into an “imaginary mirror.”
They seem scarcely more alive than the dead father and his ashes in the box.
Beth’s acting talents, her skills at blending pretense and reality succeed so
well that she clings, in her final gesture, to a man she barely knows.
When Simpatico opened on 14 November 1994, at the Joseph Papp Public
Theater in Manhattan, many reviewers detected traces of True West. The play
concerns Carter and Vinnie, childhood friends from Cucamonga, California.
After being involved in a scheme to fix horse-racing bets, they destroyed the
former racing commissioner Simms (who now goes by the name of Ames).
Thereafter, they went in different directions. Vinnie became a vagabond living
in a depressing apartment in his rural home town, barely able to make ends
meet. Carter, on the other hand, is a success. Living in Kentucky, he became
an influential, wealthy businessman and a happy family man, who pays Vinnie
a small sum to keep quiet about their past. To complicate matters, Carter
“stole” Vinnie’s girlfriend, Rosie, and married her, thus making their present
relationship all the more awkward and threatening.
As the action begins, Carter returns to Cucamonga to sever his ties with
Vinnie. He wants to pay his former partner a large cash settlement for the negatives of pornographic photographs Vinnie had shot of Rosie and Simms in a
motel room years before. However, some of these have apparently fallen into
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the hands of a woman Vinnie has just met. When Carter finally meets her,
however, it seems that the story had been untrue. Once again Shepard raises
questions of the nature of the real and how it is to be recuperated. By the end
of the play, Carter loses control of Vinnie, and, recognizing the loss of his
manipulative powers, begins to break down. Like Lee in True West, Vinnie
gains a victory of sorts over this play’s Austin, Carter.
Shepard symbolizes Carter’s uncomfortable alliance with Vinnie through
alcohol. Carter abandoned drinking as his professional and private life flourished, but now, back to his roots, reunited with Vinnie, he succumbs to the
bottle. By the play’s end, he falls ill, the victim less of alcohol than of his own
wayward life, a life that symbolically sickens him. Shepard, who directed the
play, has explained that “identity is a question for everybody in the play,” a
point reinforced by characters who drift, search, and desperately try to arrive
at the real (Brantley, “Sam Shepard, Storyteller,” 26). Ed Harris, whom Shepard
directed in the role of Eddie in Fool for Love twelve years earlier and who
played Carter in Simpatico, observed that “‘my character is full of guilt and
lies. And I was asking Sam, isn’t there some place where he admits to all that
and gets close to it? He said, ‘Sorry Ed, I can’t let you off the hook’” (Brantley,
“Sam Shepard, Storyteller,” 26). Indeed, the play ends with a sense of solitariness permeating the theatre. The mythic illusion of an older, nobler West
cannot compete in the age of computers and off-track betting. Simms concurs
with Vinnie’s contempt for the lawyers who wear “tasseled loafers free of
manure.” He feels bitter. Once an influential figure in the horse-racing circuit,
his involvement in a betting scandal forced him to start a new life under an
assumed name. His very identity has been removed. He now survives by
virtue of a menial job with the Kentucky Racing Commission. The lawyers are
“the ones who’ll kill a horse to collect the insurance,” he complains. The characters in Simpatico seem entrapped in this ruthless world, and their prospects
for transcendence are limited. Like so many earlier Shepard heroes, they are
victims, of themselves no less than of their circumstances. Although some
critics felt that the tensions between Carter and Vinnie failed to rise to those
between Austin and Lee in True West, a palpable sense of regret, guilt, and loss
nonetheless remains. The characters seem haunted by an implied dread, a felt
terror. They are caught up in a plot whose very indeterminacy prevents their
escape.
The distinguishing marks of Shepard’s dramas lie in his distinctive use of
language, myth, music, and predatory characters. Victims and victimizers,
the pursued and the pursuer vie for a metaphorical, psychological, and spiritual space in his plays. Meanwhile, options slowly diminish.
There are no real survivors, no remissions of pain. Spaces open up which
prove unbridgeable. Necessity rules. Irony is constantly reborn from the frustrated desires of those who obey compulsions they would wish to resist. And
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yet there is “a fire in the snow,” there is a fractured poetry, there is an energy
and a passion to the lives of those whose demons he stages. There is an intensity, a resonance and a power which lifts them above their social insignificance just as the plays themselves never compromise with the banality of
surfaces. Shepard is a myth-maker who deconstructs myths, a story-teller
aware of the coercive power of story. He is, finally and incontrovertibly, a poet
of the theatre who himself discovers poetry in the broken lives which are the
subject of his plays, and in the broken society which they inhabit.
Adrienne Kennedy
If Albee provided Shepard with an artistic boost through his Village Voice
review of Icarus’s Mother, his support of Adrienne Kennedy was even more
direct. She recalls, in Deadly Triplets, her reflections on her life in the theatre
and experiences with various artists, a turning point in her career: “When I
joined Albee’s workshop, January 1962, I submitted my play Funnyhouse of a
Negro as a writing sample to get into the class.” Several weeks later she
learned that Albee liked the play and that, indeed, she had been selected to
participate in the workshop. Although excited, Kennedy grew apprehensive
as the date her play was to be staged approached: “During the winter, I
became frightened. My play seemed far too revealing and much to my own
shock, I had used the word ‘nigger’ throughout the text. I decided to drop out
of the class.” After meeting with Albee, she explained, “‘I’m embarrassed to
have it done. The other plays so far are not as revealing.’” A supportive Albee
replied, “‘A playwright is someone who lets his guts out on the stage and
that’s what you’ve done in this play.’ I didn’t know what to say. That was the
point. I didn’t want my guts let out in front of the whole class. I stepped back
and started toward the door.” Then Albee added, “‘It’s your decision’ . . . He
didn’t smile or move but only continued to look at me with his hypnotic eyes”
(Deadly Triplets, 101).
Adrienne Kennedy quietly established herself as one of the more innovative and important playwrights. Two years before joining Albee’s workshop,
she experienced another career turning point when she traveled to West
Africa in 1960–61, a trip that crystallized in her mind the dilemma blacks face
when coming to terms with their racial past and colonized present. In Ghana,
at a time when Patrice Lumumba, the Zairean leader, was assassinated and
when Ghana had just become a republic, she read the works of Chinua
Achebe, Amos Tutuola, and Wole Soyinka, among others, and began conceptualizing her first successful play, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962). Just as
Kennedy herself struggled with her double consciousness – as a woman who
on a daily basis lived with an awareness of African and American European
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cultures – so Sarah in Funnyhouse of a Negro struggles with a sense of split
identity.
After her travels to Africa and her efforts at Albee’s playwriting seminars,
Kennedy decided to let her “guts out.” Through three decades of playwriting
she has cultivated an experimental theatre whose non-realistic features have
long stood as the shaping principle of her work, her claim to genuine originality. The complexity of her dramaturgy invites charges of obscurity, but hers
is an obscurity charged with its own coherence. Her plays are revealing,
though their revelatory quality invites audiences to set aside traditional
Aristotelian conceptions of unity, place, and time. Her works invite audiences
to suspend logical structures and respond to the unexpected. Plot and character, action and theme usually remain in soft focus.
In Kennedy’s theatre, action and language emanate not from a realistic
character but a surrealistically conceived figure whose subconscious defines
her being. Psychological as much as social forces animate her characters,
while internal rather than exterior events energize her plays. Perhaps this
explains why the playwright calls her dramas “states of mind.” It also
accounts for her reliance on dream motifs and, indeed, the dream is a key to
Kennedy’s creativity. Dream motifs, with their disjunctive, associative, and
surrealistic textures, unify her unique mimesis. She once noted that “the
people I met in the theatre seemed to be dream interludes in my life,” and her
plays reflect such “dream interludes” (Deadly Triplets, viii). Above all, they
interweave external experience with a subjectivity whose interiority destabilizes as it informs.
In Funnyhouse of a Negro, a woman appears as if in a dream, sleepwalking
across the stage. The four locales in which the play takes place – Queen
Victoria’s chamber, the Duchess of Hapsburg’s chamber, a room in a Harlem
hotel, and the jungle – further contribute to the non-realistic ethos of the play,
a point confirmed when Sarah, the central character, tells the audience that
these are her “rooms.” Whether these are taken as actual rooms or Sarah’s
psychologized projections, they define the funnyhouse in which she lives, representing various aspects of her split personality. Other characters – the
Mother, the Landlady (Funnylady), Raymond (Funnyman), and Jesus – and the
exaggerated props – a huge ebony bed strangely reminiscent of a tomb – only
add to the Kafkaesque quality of Funnyhouse of a Negro. There is a brittle “funniness” or strangeness to this play, a sinister foreboding that skirts the edges
of a repressed hysteria.
Sarah embodies such strangeness. Her very mind represents the funnyhouse of this black woman. Not surprisingly, Sarah is a less than reliable narrator. She appears divided against her self, the two dominant cultures, one
black, the other white, affecting her psyche. Feelings of guilt, shame, and
loss contribute to her troubled spirit. An alienated and bewildered Sarah pos-
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sesses four distinct personalities whose narratives no less than cultures
intensify her sense of disassociation. Her multiple selves are represented by
the Duchess of Hapsburg and Queen Victoria, two white figures from a decidedly Eurocentric culture. Kennedy also includes Patrice Lumumba and Jesus,
described as a “hunchbacked yellow-skinned dwarf.” Meanwhile, a white landlady presides over Sarah’s (funny) house, while Sarah must deal with her
Jewish boyfriend, Raymond (these two additional characters being the only
ones whose identities are separate from Sarah’s). Her four selves comingle on
stage, revealing her complexity.
Sarah feels emotionally splintered. Her dreams, fantasies, and multiple personalities increasingly make it impossible for her to maintain much grasp on
objective reality. She identifies Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg
with her light-skinned (black) mother, and with her white European sense of
self. She associates the other two selves, Patrice Lumumba and Jesus, with
her father, whose darkness she emphasizes – “the blackest of them all” – as
well as with her African legacies. Kennedy describes Sarah as having “paleyellow skin” and “no glaring Negroid features,” while she agonizes over her
hair, which she calls “frizzy” and “kinky.” As the play develops, Sarah’s four
selves verbalize her family’s psychohistory, revealing her parents’ marriage,
her father’s insistence that they return to Africa to engage in missionary work,
her mother’s subsequent descent into madness, and her father’s death by
hanging in his Harlem apartment, possibly a suicide, possibly victim of a
murder. Sarah certainly asserts that she had killed her father, although
Raymond insists that he is still alive. “Her father is a doctor, married to a white
whore,” he announces at the end of the play. “He is a nigger who eats his meals
on a white glass table.” Raymond indicts her father for succumbing to the
dominant white culture, insisting that he now lives “in the city in a room with
European antiques, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books and oriental
carpets,” obviously a place where blackness is noticeable by its absence. The
only theatrical certainty lies in Sarah’s final action. Unable to come to terms
with her double heritage, with her blackness, with her cross-cultural perspectives, she hangs herself, suicide being the most concrete, definite action she
performs during a play defined by its lack of definitions.
Kennedy extended her alogical non-realism in The Owl Answers (1965), A
Rat’s Mass (1966), A Lesson in Dead Language (1968), A Beast’s Story (1969),
and in Sun (1969), a choreopoem, or hybrid of poetry, dance, and drama of a
kind that Ntozake Shange would develop five years later with For Colored Girls
Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf (1974). After her
realistic Evening with Dead Essex (1973), a play inspired by the murder of
African American sniper Mark James Essex, she staged the expressionistic A
Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White at the Public Theater Workshop in
1976, under the direction of Joseph Chaikin. As she matured as a dramatist,
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Kennedy continued to eschew traditional theatrical forms, experimenting
instead with a variety of technical styles that placed her in the vanguard of
American drama and theatre. Her growing maturity is perhaps best seen in A
Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White.
Kennedy revives She/Clara from The Owl Answers, now transplanting her
into yet another white cultural milieu, the American cinema. Whereas the
earlier play presented white English literary and historical giants as She’s
antagonists, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White replaces them with
white film giants who imprison in a more subtle way. This highly inventive
play modulates between the reality of the play itself, and the illusions of three
black and white movies filmed in the forties and fifties. Dramatic moments in
Clara’s life intersect with emotional high points in the three films, Now,
Voyager (the 1942 film featuring Bette Davis and Paul Henreid); Viva Zapata!
(the 1952 epic starring Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, and Jean Peters as his beautiful lover); and, finally, A Place in the
Sun (the 1951 film version of Theodore Dreiser’s classic naturalistic novel, An
American Tragedy [1925], which starred Montgomery Clift as Clyde Griffiths,
Shelley Winters as Roberta Alden, and Elizabeth Taylor as Sondra Finchley).
Clara’s yearnings and fears complement and conflict with scenes from these
film classics, which are now reconstituted in A Movie Star Has to Star in Black
and White in multiple settings, including a hospital lobby (which also doubles
as a ship’s deck), her brother Wally’s room, and Clara’s old room. Theatrical
and cinematic illusions meld, creating a montage of compelling narratives
that give form and substance to the play.
Kennedy underscores the relation between the cinematic text and the performative script when suggesting that Clara “has a passive beauty and is totally
preoccupied. She pays no attention to anyone, only writing in a notebook. Her
movie stars speak for her. Clara lets her movie stars star in her life.” The melding
of the imaginative with the real becomes more pronounced when Clara’s
husband asks her a question, only to have Bette Davis from Now, Voyager
reply. Clara, meanwhile, remains fixed on writing throughout the play, her way
of reinscribing her own life, of reordering a fictional world so that her real
world may make better sense. Thus Kennedy’s non-linear strategy perfectly
captures the reflections of Clara as she interacts with The Mother, The Father,
and The Husband, and with her son, Eddie, Jr., and her brother Wally, who lies
near death in a hospital room after an automobile accident. We see Clara in
various social and familial roles – mother, wife, writer, sister, and black woman
who repeats the lines from The Owl Answers, “I call God and the Owl answers.”
A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White is metatheatrical, calling attention to the artificiality of film and play alike. In Scene I, Bette Davis and Paul
Henried, on the deck of the ocean liner from Now Voyager, narrate Clara’s
parents’ dreams of moving to the North, where they hope to escape “the back
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woods of Georgia,” and where, as The Father continues, “We Negro leaders
dream of leading our people out of the wilderness.” Of course, historical fact
vitiates the parents’ heroic ideals, for they discover that racial injustice
haunts the North as well.
The action of Scene II occurs in two places simultaneously: in a hospital
room where Clara and her mother gather to be together with the braindamaged Wally, and in the bedroom scene from Viva Zapata!. We learn of
Clara’s marital difficulties, which mirror her parents’ own marital breakdowns. As The Mother and The Father exchange bitter words, “Marlon Brando
continuously helps Jean Peters change sheets,” a stylized ceremony prompted
by Jean Peters’s character bleeding onto the bedside, which in turn triggers
Clara’s memory of her miscarriage while her husband, Eddie, was in the military. Clara, moreover, reveals her anxiety of balancing motherhood with
career.
The last brief scene, set in Clara’s old room, juxtaposes Clara’s anxieties
about being a creative black woman writer – “Ever since I was twelve I have
secretly wanted to be a writer. Everyone says it’s unrealistic for a Negro to
want to write” – with the climactic murder-by-drowning scene in A Place in the
Sun. In Dreiser’s novel, as in the Hollywood film version, Clyde Griffiths finds
himself romantically involved with two women, the working-class Roberta
Alden and the socialite Sondra Finchley. When Roberta informs him that she
is pregnant and expects his full support, Clyde plots to kill her by rowing her
to the middle of the lake and drowning her. Once out on the lake, he panics,
horrified that he could ever actually commit murder. The boat overturns,
Roberta goes under, and he does nothing to save her. The court finds Clyde
guilty, and Dreiser’s grim determinism insists on a “no exit” ending in which a
sense of helplessness and loss dominates. Kennedy appropriates a similar
sense of helplessness and loss in the play’s last scene, for Clara’s life too
closely parallels the tragic lives portrayed by Montgomery Clift and Shelley
Winters. Kennedy ends her play at the precise moment when Shelley Winters
drowns, and Clara’s last lines emphasize the possibility of falling, of collapsing: “The doctor said today that my brother will live; he will be brain damaged
and paralyzed. After he told us, my mother cried in my arms outside the hospital. We were standing on the steps, and she shook so that I thought both of
us were going to fall headlong down the steps.”
Kennedy remains a vital if lesser-known figure in American drama, though
a retrospective of all of her major works staged at the Signature Theatre
Company in New York City in 1995 brought fresh attention to her plays. From
such dramas as A Beast’s Story through The Ohio State Murders (1992), from
her collaboration with John Lennon and Victor Spinetti on The Lennon Play:
In His Own Write (1967) to Black Children’s Day (1980), one of her children’s
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plays, Kennedy continues to expand the nature of theatricality with an innovative style whose originality remains as fresh as it is challenging.
Amiri Baraka
Just as Albee had encouraged Shepard and Kennedy, so he helped Amiri
Baraka. Baraka’s The Dutchman, arguably his best play, opened on 12 January
1964 at the Village South Theatre before moving to the Cherry Lane Theatre
on 24 March, where Albee’s performance workshop, Theatre 1964, produced
it. Few dramatists of the sixties and seventies replicate the rebelliousness and
incipient days-of-rage ethos of Everett LeRoi Jones (Baraka). His is a theatre
of resistance. Prompted by the realities of racial injustice, he moved from his
Beat-influenced poetry of the late fifties to a radicalized drama expressive of
a new black cultural nationalism in the sixties. Thereafter he became spokesperson for African Americans in the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist tradition. His is a
theatre committed to rediscovering and restoring black identity in a white
world. (See also Schlueter’s discussion.)
His career began in 1958 with A Good Girl is Hard to Find, which was followed a year later by an unpublished drama, Revolt of the Moonflowers. By
1961 Dante had been staged at the Off-Bowery Theatre in New York City, which
derived from his novel The System of Dante’s Hell and was reinvented as The
Eighth Ditch at the New Bowery Theatre in New York City in 1964. Indeed, 1964
was a watershed year for Baraka. No less than four other plays – The Baptism,
The Toilet, The Dutchman, and The Slave – were staged, with Dutchman
earning an Obie Award.
Writing twenty years after The Dutchman’s debut, he recalled that “when
the magazines and electronic media coverage of the play and local word got
out, I could see that not only was the play an artistic success, despite my
being called ‘foul-mouthed,’ ‘full of hatred,’ ‘furious,’ ‘angry,’ I could tell that
the play had made its mark, that it would not quietly fade away”
(Autobiography, 188). The Dutchman does not fade because in cultural no less
than in mythical terms it theatricalizes one of the most divisive public issues
of the nation, race relations, and its effect on the individual. The play unwinds
in a subway, which Baraka immediately allegorizes through the opening stage
directions: Clay, a young middle-class black intellectual, and Lula, a flirtatious
young white woman, experience a chance encounter “In the flying underbelly
of the city. Steaming hot, and summer on top, outside. Underground. The subway
heaped in modern myth.” Rather like Albee’s The Zoo Story, The Dutchman presents two characters whose initial light-hearted banter quickly turns to
verbal, then physical assault, culminating when Lula, as Edenic temptress
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taunts, “Come on, Clay. Let’s rub bellies on the train Clay.” A reticent Clay,
pushed by Lula’s litany of racial and sexual taunts, lashes back, only to have
Lula plunge a knife twice into his chest.
When Albee’s The Zoo Story ends with a similar murder-by-knifing, the
gesture is paradoxically redemptive. Not so with The Dutchman. Baraka’s
ending brooks no epiphanic moment in which Lula or Clay comes to some
higher awareness. Instead, Lula instructs her fellow white passengers to
throw the body out before eyeing her next victim, yet another young black
man who has just entered the subway. The cycle is about to repeat itself.
The Dutchman’s virtuosity emanates from its linguistic if not racial ambiguities, and such ambiguities foreground the play’s complexity, especially in the
context of Lula’s anesthetized stance toward murder. The play plainly is a
social protest drama, but it is something more than that. It transcends its
sociopolitical content, germane as it clearly is. Baraka, writer and activist, is
drawn in two apparently contradictory directions, so, in The Dutchman, Clay
must negotiate between conflicting demands. His decision to retreat into language leads to his ritualized murder.
The Slave extends Baraka’s moral search for black consciousness and identity. Like The Dutchman, it unfolds within a setting that is at once realistic and
mythic. Tensions submerged in the subterranean set of The Dutchman are
exteriorized in The Slave. Yet the pressure of personal experience hints at the
special significance of the work for a man who, in the fifties, had married “a
Jewish girl from Long Island trying to make it in the Village,” only to divorce
her for ideological reasons. “The play The Slave,” Baraka wrote, “which shows
a black would-be revolutionary who splits from his white wife on the eve of a
race war, was what [my wife] called ‘Roi’s nightmare.’ It was so close to our
real lives, so full of that living image” (Autobiography, 196).
By 1965, months after the debut of The Slave, Baraka left Hettie Cohen and
the Village, and immersed himself in directing the Black Arts
Repertory/School, living in the decidedly African American world of Harlem.
The unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) concludes “that
even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play” (503). Baraka,
flushed from his own invisibility by what he calls “the ‘fame’ Dutchman
brought me,” felt similarly compelled to wed word and deed in the name of
racial justice and cultural autonomy: “I felt, now, some heavy responsibility”
(Autobiography, 189). He met that responsibility with an uneven artistry in the
later plays.
In 1967, LeRoi Jones changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka, his new
name (“blessed prince”) bestowed upon him by the same orthodox Muslim
who had performed the funeral service for Malcolm X. His plays foreshadowed this personal transfiguration. Experimental Death Unit #1 (1965) presents Duff and Loco, two white heroine addicts who try to seduce a black
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whore. Sixties slogans blend with violence as Duff kills Loco. As the chaos proceeds, soldiers from the black rebellion Death Unit #1 appear, a ritualized
entrance underscored by drums. The blacks kill Duff while he screams
“Niggers! Niggers! Niggers!” and the woman, who assumes her blackness will
save her, is summarily shot. Western debauchery, Baraka suggests, must be
dealt with if a true spiritual revolution, in the spirit of Kawaida faith, is to
become a reality. From such plays as J-E-L-L-O (1965), A Black Mass (1966),
Madheart (1967), and The Death of Malcolm X (1969) to S-1 (1976), The Motion
of History (1977), Boy & Tarzan Appear in a Clearing (1981), and Money (1982),
the playwright increasingly turned his energies to producing agit prop pieces,
plays staged at the expense of art. Even the theatrically powerful Slave Ship
(1967), which chronicles as it celebrates “A Historical Pageant” of black
history, from independent Africans to their enslavement in the United States,
would soon yield to plays that seemed closer to politicized pamphlets rather
than committed art.
Baraka would go on to write some thirty plays, plays whose thematic and
political shifts mirror the transformations in his personal life and public politics. He may in the process have too willingly sacrificed art to ideas, but he
was never less than committed to those whose dilemmas he acknowledged
and whose lives he celebrated in their ambiguities and certainties alike.
Baraka’s passionate commitment to and immersion in the African American
experience registered deeply in the imaginations of many dramatists in the
sixties and seventies.
David Mamet
While Albee, Shepard, Kennedy, and Baraka were contributing to an ongoing
narrative of American drama in their various and singular ways, David Mamet,
beginning in the mid-seventies, appeared at first as a Chicago regionalist. He
quickly established his reputation as a writer of national and international significance, however.
A novelist, essayist, poet, Hollywood screenwriter, acting teacher, and
director, Mamet remains best known for his plays. But his non-theatre works,
too, provide an illuminating point of entry into his world. In True and False
(1997), he writes about the pressures experienced by young actors. In The Old
Religion (1997), a novel about a Jewish business manager falsely convicted of
rape and murder and lynched by a mob, Mamet explores the past. The Hero
Pony (1990), a collection of forty-two poems, displays an economy of expression that informs of “the distinction / Between art and decoration” (34). Now
a veteran at writing numerous Hollywood scripts, Mamet’s recent efforts
include the Alec Baldwin–Anthony Hopkins film The Edge (1997), the Dustin
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Hoffman film Wag the Dog (1997), and a projected remake of The Cincinnati Kid
for actor Al Pacino.
But it was in 1992 that Mamet’s career shifted. His brief, autobiographical
essay, The Rake, reveals his troubled childhood, the tensions stemming from
his parents’ divorce and a psychologically and physically abusive stepfather.
After that stepfather threw Mamet’s sister, Lynn Mamet, a California-based
writer, across a room – she fractured a vertebra in her back – he never forgave
him (his father died in 1992 – the year he published The Rake). The anger and
silences, the violence and the pauses central to Mamet’s theatre, we now
learn, stem from his family experiences and the “emotional terrorism” of his
upbringing; the vengeance and energy of all of his plays, according to his
sister, emanates from their childhood. “They’re all familial,” Lynn Mamet
reports (Weber, “At 50, a mellower David Mamet,” 12).
This explains why John, the ten-year-old in The Cryptogram (1994), goes
up the stairs with a knife – probably to commit suicide; and perhaps this is
why The Cryptogram, like The Rake before, and The Old Neighborhood (1997)
after it, registers its tonalities in more subtle, muted terms. The Old
Neighborhood, actually three earlier Mamet plays reformulated as a whole,
that opened 17 November 1997 at the Booth Theatre in New York City, is a
deeply autobiographical work. Its central figure, Bobby Gould, who Mamet
calls his alter ego, returns to his old haunting grounds, probably the Chicago
of Mamet’s youth. Now, in mid-life, Gould engages in three conversations –
with a childhood friend, his sister, and a former lover – that plainly reveal
that some shared traumatic episodes still haunt all the characters. Mamet’s
technique of restraint, of pauses, silences, and never fully articulated experiences, forces audiences to speculate on the reality to which they are seemingly exposed.
It is easier to appreciate the 1992 shift in Mamet’s career, however, by reference to his earlier plays. The subtle tonalities, the degrees of understatement in The Cryptogram and The Old Neighborhood are less in evidence there.
Instead audiences were confronted by men whose sources of rage elude and
baffle them. The rage, in part, comes from the social world in which his heroes
find themselves. From the initial plays, Camel (1968) and Lakeboat (1970), to
those pivotal works that first brought him notoriety, Sexual Perversity in
Chicago (1974) and American Buffalo (1975), from Glengarry Glen Ross (1983)
to Oleanna (1992), Mamet appropriates the play space with a singular vision.
This unity of vision usually finds its expression in terms of an implicit social
critique and sense of a deep ambiguity and inexperience. His wit and comedy
seem obvious, but beyond the comedic witticisms lie darker visions. Mamet
replicates human commitments and desires in demythicized forms: commodity fetishism, sexual negotiations and exploitations, aborted or botched
crimes, brutal physical assaults, fraudulent business transactions enacted by
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petty thieves masquerading as businessmen, and human relationships whose
only shared feature is the presence of physical sex and the absence of authentic love. Within Mamet’s theatre, relationships are reductive, women often
being marginalized and brutalized, men rendered inarticulate or suspect in
their articulateness. Exploitation becomes a normative value.
Through a poetic stage language Mamet explores the relationship between
public issues and private desires – and the effects of this relationship on the
individual’s spirit. Although his plays are varied in terms of plots and themes,
he seems at his best when exploring what he feels is a business-as-sacrament
mentality that has led to the corruption of both communal decency and individual ethics. His major achievements lie in his use of language, his exploration of private and public betrayals and alienation, his ability to stage the
anxieties, the confusions, the self-deceptions, the hypocrisies and the desperate insecurities of the individual.
The mid-seventies were pivotal years for the playwright. In 1975, American
Buffalo opened at the Goodman and soon moved to the St. Nicholas Theatre.
The play won a Joseph Jefferson Award for Outstanding Production, as did
Sexual Perversity in Chicago that same year. In 1975, Mamet finally saw his
work staged in New York City: Sexual Perversity and The Duck Variations
opened at the St. Clement’s Theatre and, in 1976, they moved to the Cherry
Lane Theatre. In 1976 American Buffalo opened at St. Clement’s, and Mamet
won an Obie for Sexual Perversity and American Buffalo. No fewer than nine
Mamet plays appeared in 1977 in theatres in New Haven, New York, Chicago
and, among other cities, London. American Buffalo, starring Robert Duvall,
premiered on Broadway in 1977, with Mamet receiving the New York Drama
Critics’ Circle Award. In 1980 Al Pacino starred in a revival at the Long Wharf
Theatre in New Haven. Such successes confirmed Mamet’s reputation as a
new and vital theatrical voice in America.
Mamet has also enjoyed success in reworking older classics, and his adaptations of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1987), Uncle Vanya (1988), and Three
Sisters (1991) all received favorable reviews. While first and foremost a playwright, Mamet has gained additional respect for his work in Hollywood. His
screenplays – The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), The Verdict (1982), The
Untouchables (1985), House of Games (1987), Things Change (1988), We’re No
Angels (1989), Homicide (1990), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), The Edge (1997)
and, among others, Wag the Dog (1997) – have been praised for their intriguing
plots and disturbing monologues. Most scholars point to House of Games,
with its ritualized forms of expiation, and Glengarry Glen Ross, with its dazzling repartee, as his best work in film. Meanwhile, Mamet has demonstrated
his skill as an essayist in Writing in Restaurants (1986) and True and False
(1997), collections that spell out the playwright’s theory of dramatic art as
well as his sense of cultural poetics.
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Mamet appears at his best when staging the tensions between his heroes’
sense of public responsibility and their definition of private liberties. Mamet
often mentions that his views of social boundaries have been greatly influenced by Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and such
indebtedness in part accounts for his preoccupation with business. Veblen’s
work, like Mamet’s, underscores human action and response in terms of
“pecuniary emulation,” imperialist ownership, and the relationship between
self-worth and wealth. Mamet’s characters, plots, and themes map out a predatory world in which only the fittest survive. His plays are concerned with
charting the moral relationship between the public issues of the nation and
the private anxieties of its citizens.
American Buffalo, first produced at the Goodman Theatre Stage Two in
Chicago, on 23 November 1975, concerns small-time thieves. They find a
buffalo nickel in Don’s junk shop, where the play unwinds, a nickel that motivates them to rob the man from whom Don supposedly purchased it. Don
orchestrates the robbery plans, which the younger Bob is to undertake.
Teach, nervous and unpredictable, insists that he should participate. In a brilliantly modulated conversation, Mamet suggests the extent to which ethics
have been devalued and theft elevated to the status of good business practice. Free enterprise, Teach lectures Don, gives one the freedom “To embark
on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit . . . In order to secure his honest chance
to make a profit.” The country, he insists, is “founded on this.” The robbery
never takes place. Indeed, it was never anything more than a fantasy which
for a moment had given coherence and purpose to an aimless existence.
Whatever friendships exist between the men temporarily dissipate: Teach
attacks Bob and trashes the entire junk shop. The play ends as Teach readies
himself to take the injured Bob to the hospital.
American Buffalo is a parodic version of the American dream, a social
drama, and a metaphysical work of genuine originality. Its characters speak a
dislocated language and inhabit a world drained of transcendence. Yet that
language is shaped into powerful arias, ironic, humorous, simultaneously evidence of a desperate need for communication and contact and its virtual
impossibility. With its echoes of another America, uncontaminated by greed,
a product of utopian rhetoric rather than psychotic fear and aggression, it
offers a portrait of the Republic in terminal decay, its communal endeavor and
individual resilience all but disappeared. The trust and unity invoked on its
coinage have now devolved into paranoia, the security and hope it once
offered into a frightening violence. Business enterprise has decayed into
simple criminality while the play’s metaphoric and literal setting – a junk store
full of the mementos of Chicago’s 1933 Exposition (motto: A Century of
Progress) – offers an image of ultimate decline.
Glengarry Glen Ross, which Harold Pinter encouraged Mamet to stage, had
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its premiere at the Cottesloe Theatre in London, on 21 September 1983,
opened in America at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, on 6 February 1984,
and with the Chicago cast intact, moved to its successful Broadway run at the
Golden Theatre in the following months. It dramatizes the high-pressure real
estate sales profession as seen through the plight of small-time salesmen.
Greed lies at the center of the play, for the characters’ directing force in life is
to secure sales “leads,” to buffalo clients to “close” the deal, and rise to the
top of the “board,” the chart announcing which man in the sales force wins
the ultimate prize – the Cadillac. The losers will simply be fired. As in The
Water Engine (1978), Mr. Happiness (1978), and American Buffalo, Glengarry
Glen Ross relies on the myth of the American Dream as its ideological backdrop. The title refers to Florida swamps, not the Scottish highlands, an indication of the extent of irony in this drama. In some ways Glengarry Glen Ross
revisits that connection between business and criminality implicit in
American Buffalo. Whereas the characters in Lakeboat, Reunion (1976), and
even The Shawl (1985) lead lives of quiet desperation, those in Glengarry Glen
Ross scream out two hours of obscenity-laced dialogue. The sales team constitute an unappetising team. Levene may be the most desperate figure, for his
business failures lead him to crime as he robs his own office to secure precious sales “leads.” Moss is the most ruthless salesman, masterminding but
not participating in the robbery, while Aaronow simply seems bewildered by
his cohorts’ sales/conmanship. Williamson is the office manager, whose lack
of sales experience and pettiness earn him the scorn of all. Ricky Roma,
however, is different.
Roma emerges as the star of the sales team. He also appears as the most
complex. Youthful and handsome, he exudes a certain panache that sets him
apart from the others. Whereas the others talk about their past conquests and
how, with luck (and deception), they will rise to the top of the sales board,
Roma produces. If Levene and Moss frenetically pursue customers, Roma
appears relaxed. He almost succeeds in swindling the unsuspecting customer,
James Lingk, persuading him to buy suspect real estate, only losing out on the
deal when Williamson inadvertently reveals the truth. But Roma loses more
than his commission. The fact is that he has already lost his ethical perspective. Like Levene and Moss, he has no conscience, no sense of the boundaries
of business ethics, and like many Mamet characters uses language to ensnare,
deceive, and justify. The play ends with Levene’s arrest, but business continues.
In Glengarry Glen Ross, entrepreneurial greed has devolved into a vaudevillian leitmotif, with the salesmen as consummate performers. The pursuit of
money under the guise of free enterprise becomes a simple excuse to deceive
and steal. The real estate salesmen pursue the Deal as their fellow citizens
pursue the Dream, a dream now detached from its ethical origins. As Roma
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17. Goodman Theatre production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, 1984, with
(left to right) Mike Nussbaum and Joe Montagna. Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe.
Courtesy of Goodman Theatre.
remarks to the unsuspecting James Lingk: “I do those things which seem
correct to me today.” Such rationalizations recur in Mamet’s theatre. Thus
when Karen, in Speed-the-Plow (1988), asks of a movie project, “Is it a good
film?”, her question is seen as irrelevant. The only legitimate issue, according
to her employer, Bobby Gould, is whether it will make money. But Karen, too,
is an opportunist, so that money, exchange, and commodity fetishism
pervade Speed-the-Plow as they do much of Mamet’s theatre. Genuine human
relationships, moral values, language as a means of communication, society
as a model of mutuality, all seem, like the buffalo, on the brink of extinction.
Fittingly, the role of Karen, herself prepared to sacrifice personal relationships
to ambition, was played by Madonna, the material girl.
Sexuality, meanwhile, is either simply a means of exchange – as it is in
Edmond (1982) – or an expression of the alienated relations between the
genders – as in The Woods (1977) and Oleanna. Men and women, in Mamet’s
work, inhabit different worlds, evidence different needs, speak a different language. In his earlier plays, this is an expression of an all but unbridgeable gulf.
In Oleanna, the failure of communication has a political edge.
Oleanna, a play partially about sexual harassment, represents the playwright’s response to the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas controversy. In Act One,
Carol, a female student, comes to the office of a male college professor, John,
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to sort out her difficulties in understanding his class. John, who is under
tenure review, offers to help. The complacent professor, who is married and
is negotiating a deal on a house, listens to Carol’s confession, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what it means.” He offers Carol advice and a consoling hand. While the audience senses an impending catastrophe, Act One gives
little hint of what is to follow as characters and audiences are forced to reevaluate language and action. Despite the popularity of this play, Mamet’s
control of language disappoints. Brittle, awkward, unnatural, the repartee
never gains theatrical momentum.
In the second act, Carol registers a complaint, accusing the professor of
sexism and sexual harassment. A confrontation merely leads to further misunderstandings. Slowly power moves from professor to student, from man to
woman, until John faces loss of tenure, the collapse of his marriage, and a
charge of rape, as, in extremis, he becomes what she accuses him of being.
“Right” becomes a function of language, the real a product of interpretation.
Only power has authority.
In Oleanna, which was originally produced by the Back Bay Theatre
Company in association with the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, on 1 May 1992, and moved to its New York City run at the
Orpheum Theatre on 25 October 1992, Mamet returns to a world in which the
gaps between words and deeds are the source of unease, of fundamental disjunctions, shifting power systems, willful refusals of communication. The play
is theatrically powerful precisely because its author never fills in such gaps.
Is Carol deliberately framing John? Are her accusations legitimate? Is Carol
simply the first to have the courage to challenge a patronizing and, perhaps,
womanizing male teacher? Is John so much a part of an inherently misogynistic world that he is blithely unaware that his well-meaning actions are in fact
highly sexist? Mamet invites the audience to respond to these and many other
issues (questions of censorship, political correctness, a battle of the sexes,
representations of women in theatre, among others). This play continues
Mamet’s exploration of a world which remains a battleground of the sexes,
where primal feelings of trust and rational human discourse between women
and men remain problematic, if not impossible. The title of the play, taken
from a folk song, alludes to a nineteenth-century escapist vision of Utopia.
Oleanna reminds us of the impossibility of such a vision.
Mamet’s theatre, in sum, repeatedly returns to broader social questions
about communication and community. Some Mamet dramas do not include
verbal tirades, or physical or psychological violence. The Duck Variations, A
Life in the Theatre (1977), Reunion (1976), The Woods, and The Shawl – to cite
plays spanning much of Mamet’s career – appear as relatively meditative
works whose plots and themes seem more interiorized. On the other hand,
the playwright seems most comfortable, and at the height of his aesthetic
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Plays and Playwrights Since 1970
power, when he explores anger and betrayal, mystery and violence, when
private loss is related to social satire. From Sexual Perversity in Chicago
through Oleanna and The Cryptogram, relationships are as ephemeral as they
are unsatisfying, while a brutalizing language masks primal insecurities. There
are no villains in his theatre – just men whose world of diminished possibilities and banalities define and confine them.
In Reunion, Bernie tells Carol that, although he comes from a broken home,
he is a happy man who works at a good job. But his uneasiness remains, particularly in light of the contemporary world in which he and Carol live: “It’s
a fucking jungle out there. And you got to learn the rules because nobody’s
going to learn them for you.” True knowledge about the soul and the universe
comes only at a price: “Always the price. Whatever it is. And you gotta know
it and be prepared to pay it if you don’t want it to pass you by.” There are no
epiphanies in Mamet’s work, only characters who struggle to survive in an
unforgiving world. In Edmond, the protagonist is racist, sexist, and homophobic. He leaves his “safe” marriage and embarks on an urban quest to find
meaning for his fragmented world. Encountering violence, murder, sexual
frustration, and other impediments, he winds up in jail, sodomized by his
black cell-mate. What Edmond learns from his quest is the necessity to
accept his own role as acquiescent victim. He becomes the compliant partner
of his cell-mate.
In Writing in Restaurants Mamet writes, “As the Stoics said, either gods exist
or they do not exist. If they exist, then, no doubt, things are unfolding as they
should; if they do not exist, then why should we be reluctant to depart a world
in which there are no gods?” (114). This reflection stands as the metaphysical
question Mamet raises, and never resolves, in his plays. His characters half
believe in a structure of meaning for which they can find no evidence. They
display the rhetoric of a civic responsibility which their own lives deny. They
acknowledge the need for trust and mutual responsibility while capitalizing
on that trust and betraying that responsibility. They fear solitude but distrust
the other. As the frightened boy confesses to his mother at the end of The
Cryptogram, “I hear voices,” voices that even an adult, not to mention a tenyear-old, would have difficulty decoding.
Those voices which might be the source of consolation are more likely to
be the source of terror. These are people who fail to break the code of their
society, fail to acknowledge human necessities. Dimly aware of the values they
deny, the social contract which they abrogate, they obey other imperatives,
disconnected from their inner lives, inimical to their fundamental needs. Yet,
for all that, they are often consummate performers, accomplished storytellers, masters of deceit who implicitly challenge the nature of the real and
hence the elaborate structures erected upon it. They may not meet each other
in the alienated environment which they inhabit or the sexual encounters to
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which they are infrequently driven, but they do make momentary contact
within the fictions which they deploy with such evident relish as if these constituted the true drama, the stage on which they are to act their lives. In A Life
in the Theatre, two men perform on and off stage, sometimes r